Last Kiss from the Vampire by Jennifer McKenzie

Last Kiss from the Vampire
    Megan was coming home from a hard night at the diner. The sun was coming up and it was time to get back in her box. However, she didn’t know if it would be a good idea to let her boyfriend out of his.
    The late shift at the Baudelaire Diner in the town of Skiptrap, Pennsylvania was always a difficult one. Weekends were the worst since the staff never knew who was coming in the door. They were far enough away from the city to not have to deal with the worst party animals and yet close enough to encounter the occasional car full of road trippers from Allentown. The worst crowd they would ever see were the ghosts who floated in from the abandoned and forgotten cemetery in back of the farmer’s field two miles down the road. They only spoke German, so waiting on them was a nightmare in and of itself. Plus, they paid with gold coins, which the management had tried to tell them over and over again couldn’t be banked through the normal channels. But the ghosts hadn’t been by in months, so Megan assumed they had found another diner to haunt.
    Tonight’s crowd had been bearable, but Megan was ready to leave as soon as her shift was over. She had counted out the cash and put in her deposit bag before transferring it to her car. She had tried to get the management to use a security company to come and retrieve the evening’s deposit, but the owners kept telling her how good a job she did and why then would they want to use anyone else? Megan had sighed and gone back to the method she was using. It was a good job and late night jobs were hard to find. Especially working for such an understanding group of owners.
    She had finished up by checking on her inventory and made sure the schedule was in order for the week. Everyone was on board with the new posting. She had pinned it to the notice board, right below the OSHA notice. She couldn’t imagine anyone having trouble reading the damn thing this week and there were no new requests for time off. Megan finished the night by counting up the stacks of cash with Larry, her assistant manager and sealed it all in the pouch with the receipt safely inside. God forbid the count is off and the pouch has to be reopened. Doing that would involve another half hour of work.
    She got in her car and put the pouch right next to her in the passenger seat. Megan checked the time on her cell phone: four in the morning. Good, she had enough time to get home and not have to worry about a thing. It was all going according to plan. Too bad it didn’t work out so well every night.
    She circled around the bank three times to make the deposit. Skiptrap wasn’t a bad town, but there had been a rash of snatch and grabs over the past few months from the local stores and people were getting nervous. She didn’t care who was doing them or why, it was the local police’s job to take care of such things. Everything looked good at the bank  and she pulled up to the night drop, pulled out her key, unlocked it, and reached into the passenger seat for the bag of cash.
    And turned to face the biggest gun she had ever seen in her life.
    The man holding it had a scarf over his face and was wearing a hooded sweat shirt, which was strange since it was the middle of July. He wore a pair of dark sunglasses and lowered the gun at her face.
    “Get out of the car,” he said. “And bring that big bag of cash with you.”
    She put her small car into park and opened the door. She left the engine running just in case. Megan had the bag of cash in her other hand and held it up to the man while he watched her carefully the gun still in his hand.
    “Now give it to me,” he told her.
    “Why did you go and do this?” she asked him.
    “I said give me the money!” He raised his voice. There was nobody else around this early in the morning, but still….
    “You had to really mess things up this time,” she said to him. “Johnny.”
    She saw him nearly jump in the air. His disguise hadn’t been