Lamb Read Free

window and looked at her friends, who stood frozen, the ends of their ponytails hung limp in the thin air.
    Lamb pulled the door shut and locked it and started the engine. “You’re not hurt, are you?” Sheshrank against the door, holding her head. “I’m taking you home,” he said. “I’m just taking you home. What’s your address?” She faced the window and pulled on the door handle again and again and again, knocked and knocked, and she looked back at him over her shoulders. Her eyes were huge. Then they were free and clear, out of the parking lot and onto the four-lane.
    “Where do you live?” he raised his voice, gained speed. “Tell me which way.” They passed a KFC, a BP. She told him in a trembling voice and he repeated it, pointing over the tops of the stores to three apartment buildings. The girl nodded. He scolded her the whole way, playing it angry. His hands were shaking on the wheel. The backs of his thighs wet. He yelled at her like he thought a father would have done.
    “I could be taking you somewhere to kill you. You know that?”
    She clung to the door on her side.
    “It was a dumb thing to do, coming up to me like that. Wasn’t it?”
    She pulled at the handle again and again.
    “Say something.”
    “I’m sorry,” the girl whispered. “Please.” She was terrified. Well, good. It was true, what he’d said. He could be taking her off to kill her. He could do anything he wanted. Her lips drew intoward her gapped teeth. “Now just stop it,” he said. “Just stop it.” And when he saw where she lived, near the freeway behind a gas station off six lanes of traffic—and for the second time in the minutes since she’d first approached him—a feeling of pity for her was eclipsed by the shock of knowing he, too, was on the losing end of all this. After all, here he was. It was a moment they were trapped in together.
    “Don’t let your friends push you around like that,” he said. She stared at him and tugged on the door handle. “And put some clothes on.” He looked her up and down. “I mean, what are you supposed to be? Who decided you were going to be this way—all stupid and … dressed like that?”
    “Please,” she whispered. She was white.
    “Now wait,” he said and pulled into the square lot before the entrance of her building. He unlocked the doors and she fell out. “Wait a minute,” he said. He had her purse and waved it. “Keys?”
    She crawled up onto her feet and stepped away from the car, a body’s length away, and looked at the purse.
    “Give it to me!”
    “Now wait a minute.”
    “Calling the police!” Her voice was shrill. Lamb glanced around. It was an accusation. A warning. But only because she was humilated. Lamb saw hertaking it all in: his expensive suit, the Ford Explorer, the leather seats, his clean haircut, his smooth face, everything clean, everything expensive, everything easy. He handed her the purse and she took out the cigarettes and threw them at him.
    “I’m not a bad guy,” he said. “But I could have been.”
    Her eyes were lit up with hate.
    “Good,” Lamb said. “That’s good.” There was some little filament of heat in this girl that he had not expected, and he was relieved to see it, relieved to be surprised by something. By anything. Across from the apartment building a traffic light turned green and a car honked and the traffic moved again. A middle-aged man with a huge gut and a brown mustache stood at the glass doors watching them.
    “Maybe I should come in and tell your folks what happened,” he said.
    “Nobody’s home.” Of course they weren’t.
    “You have sisters? Brothers?”
    “I have friends.” She flung her words like stones.
    “That’s right,” Lamb said, nodding. “You think they went in that drugstore to tell someone what happened?”
    She looked at him, her eyes reducing back to their stupid blue. “No.”
    “Me either.”
    He watched her face fall. He knew what that was. He knew about