The diner was empty apart from the guy in the corner.

‘I don’t suppose you have a light?’, he said, walking over.

‘Sure’, Patty said, flicking her Zippo, hiding the stain, snuffing it out. ‘Spare a cigarette?’

‘Oh yeah.’

The waitress looked at them out of the corner of her eye, curling her lip.

Patty stepped outside into the diesel fumes. They began the smokers’ chat, weather, money. Then he said it.

‘Last night I killed a man.’ He blew smoke skywards. ‘A guy got smart. He was nobody, really.’

‘That right?’

Silence. And just two burning cigarette ends in the cold.

‘Why you telling me this?’, she said.

‘Cause there’s one thing I always feel like doing after I kill someone.’

‘No shit?’

‘You look good to me.’

‘I ain’t gonna sleep with you.’

‘I ain’t asking you to sleep with me, honey. How old are you anyway?’

‘Twenty-six.’

‘No shit. There’s a bad dude out there, in case you ain’t heard, he’s been chopping women up. Much badder’n old Jim. I don’t kill ladies, just fuck them.’

‘I can look after myself.’

‘Heard one woman got her throat opened up real bad. Out here, alone, just her thumb in the air and only her poontang to pay. They call him the maniac trucker, although I hear this guy drives a pick up.’

‘Thank you for the smokes’, she said, walking back in.

Inside, the waitress stared at her from behind the counter, hands on her hips. Then she went out back. Patty felt weak and as she tried to remember the last time she’d eaten, Jim walked in, laughing, almost dancing across the diner to where she sat.

‘Come on, darling, we can do it in the john’, he said.

The smell of pizza drifted across the air.

‘How much you got?’

‘I knew you were a pick up. I reckon you’re worth a hundred.’

‘Hundred and fifty.’

‘Done.’

He peeled a stack of tens out of his wallet and laid them in her palm.

‘I’ll see you in the john’, she said.

After a few minutes Jim made his way there.

She was standing at the back, past the urinals, outside the only clean cubicle.

Jim walked in and put a broom handle against the door.

‘Well, hallafuckinglooya baby.’

‘Come on’, she said, walking into the cubicle, pulling down her jeans.

‘You’re as sweet as cherry pie, ain’t you?’

She thought she heard someone trying the door as he entered her. She looked over Jim’s shoulder at a fly crawling across the graffiti. She felt the cold wall against her buttocks as he stopped.

He winked and ran his finger across her cheek.

‘Told you I ain’t the maniac trucker.’

He looked down at her right forearm and shook his head. A jagged scar running through the word “Mom”.

After he left she heard a pick up drive off as she checked herself in the mirror.

Then the door opened and the waitress walked in.

‘I fucking knew’, she said. ‘I saw him leave, I’m calling the po-lice.’

‘Why the fuck you such a bitch?’

‘You just made a big mistake, you ho.’

‘You don’t get to call me no hooker, you’re just a fucking waitress.’

She was trying to leave when Patty grabbed her hair. She spun round and struck Patty hard across the face.

‘I wish that killer would pick you’, the waitress said.

Patty smiled.

‘Oh yeah?’

She had one fist clenched in the waitress’s uniform as she pulled her switchblade from her pocket and opened up her throat. The blade was still moving in the air as the waitress spurted blood on the wall, staggering round with her eyes popping. And Patty watched her fall, one hand on the floor, reaching for something she never found.

She stepped over the body and out of the diner and hailed a passing truck.

Jim went back the next day and heard the waitress had been killed by the maniac trucker.

Every time he took a piss there, he thought of the hot little tattooed thing he’d screwed, as the steam rose from the urinal like a mist.