Plot

While stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop, a traveling salesman is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.

At a remote desert location in Yuma County, Arizona, in the 1970s, a traveling knives salesman stops at a filling station. Vernon, the station and motel attendant, informs him that the station's pumps are dry, and there are no other filling stations for over 100 miles (160 km), but that a refueling truck is expected to arrive soon. On the radio, the salesman hears about a bank robbery earlier that morning in Buckeye, where the robbers fled with approximately $700,000 in a green Ford Pinto with a damaged rear end. Charlotte, a waitress at the nearby diner, is dropped off by her husband Charlie, who is the local sheriff; she opens the diner and welcomes the salesman in. In conversation with Charlotte, he mentions that he is on his way to Carlsbad, California, for his daughter Sarah's birthday.

Shortly afterwards, the two bank robbers, Travis and Beau, pass the wreck of a refueling truck and arrive in a green Pinto, which the salesman recognizes as matching the description of the getaway car in the Buckeye robbery. He communicates his suspicions to Charlotte, who tries to phone her husband at the police station, but Beau forestalls her and cuts the phone cord before Charlotte can say a word to the sheriff. The robbers force her and the salesman at gunpoint to continue behaving normally-until the refueling truck arrives, or somebody else with enough fuel in their car stops by. Unbeknownst to everybody in the diner, the truck will never arrive because it has run off the road and lies overturned several miles away.

Charlie has his deputy, Gavin, come by the diner to pick up coffee for the police station and Charlotte tries to slip a plea for help to him on a coffee lid, but the coffee is spilled with the lid unseen when Gavin bumps into Travis. Meanwhile, joining the salesman and Charlotte in the diner are an elderly couple from Texas, a pair of young aspiring criminals named Miles and Sybil, and local rancher Pete. With the fuel tank of Pete's vehicle being almost full, Beau and Travis try to force him into giving his car keys to them, but with several people in the diner carrying a firearm, a Mexican standoff develops. Pete tries to negotiate a way out of the impasse. However, Charlotte stabs Beau with a knife, which sparks a shootout in which everybody gets killed except for the salesman and Sybil. Sybil shoots at the salesman, and he manages to stab her dead in self-defence.

The salesman decides to take the robbers' loot from the Pinto's trunk and syphons some fuel from Pete's truck. Before leaving in his own Toyota he is interrupted by a young couple with a baby who arrive on the scene. In an ensuing scuffle, the salesman ends up killing them both and, unbeknownst to him, shooting his gas tank. The salesman leaves the crying baby in the couple's car, and drives off with a trail of spilled gas behind him. The sheriff and deputy arrive and discover the carnage. Seeking vengeance for his wife's murder, the sheriff tracks the fleeing salesman, whose car has run out of gasoline near the wreck of the refueling truck. The sheriff doubts the salesman's claims of innocence and shoots at the salesman as he flees. Just before he is shot in the gut, salesman ignites a trail of gas that destroys the fuel truck, presumably killing the sheriff. The salesman slumps onto his bag of money as notes blow away in the wind. (thanks to Wikipedia)