Midnight to Dawn No-one else wanted my shift. Midnight to dawn. Midnight to dawn in a run-down roadhouse on a backroad in the middle of the arse-end of nowhere. Some idiot had decided there needed to be a service station here, and they threw their money at it, and called it ‘The Old Well’, due to the amazing fact that there was … an old well there. Not that there’d been any water in it for decades. There was even a windmill they’d put in to draw the water, but that was chained up now. Rusting. We used the well to get rid of the rubbish. It’s deep, and the council charged an arm and a leg to send the trucks out here, so … Some smartarse had painted out the ‘W’ on the sign and replaced it with a spray-painted ‘H’. So now it read ‘The Old Hell’. Fit the place perfectly. It was hot, dirty and uncomfortable, and no-one in their right mind would have wanted to spend any time there. The occasional customer we got would look shocked or sympathetic and then nick off as fast as they could. Midnight to dawn we didn’t get many customers. Even the trucks that came through only stopped if they were desperate for a piss or a pie or a coffee. Instant, of course. All the mod cons. But I loved midnight to dawn for exactly that reason. No-one gawking at me. No-one slagging me off. No-one wondering why the daughter of the idiot who built the dump was now earning minimum wage for doing nothing at a place she obviously didn’t own. No-one doing anything. Noone asking anything. Perfect. I had my books and my music and my rifle. The gun was licenced, of course. Locked in a metal box. But there. Just in case. I’d only ever had to really use it once. There are blokes who travel out this way who don’t understand the word ‘No’. Blokes who might think a woman on her own at night is a soft-touch or an easy mark. One bloke who probably still has .22 bullet holes in his back window and tailgate. Not a return customer, that one. Most just left after looking down the barrel. 56
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