“Do I know any truck drivers who would be willing to take me on?” Jenny asked. “Maybe we could go truck to truck at the next truck stop and see if any guys would be willing to let me bunk with them while I learn to drive.”
Hugh laughed out loud at that one.
“Honey, if you treated some poor truck driver the way you did me the first time you got on my truck, that guy would drive himself off a cliff before the first day was over.”
Jenny nodded, laughing now herself. “Yeah. Who would have thought I’d go in such a short time from ‘What a bitch’ and ‘Couldn’t wait to get rid of her,’ to being engaged to America’s most-famous trucker.”
Hugh remembered, and Jenny obviously did as well, his phone call with James when he was telling him about meeting Jenny. Hugh had thought he had gotten rid of her when he had given her shower credits at a truck stop in Ely, Nevada. This was shortly after picking her up. She had been a smelly, obnoxious, pain-in-the-ass hitchhiker, and he hadn’t wanted to have anything to do with her.
He had planned to take off as soon as Jenny had gone into the shower, leaving her behind.
As he had pulled away from the truck stop Hugh had thought he had tricked Jenny, and she wasn’t in his truck anymore. It turned out the trick was on Hugh, however, as she had doubled back, getting to the truck before Hugh, and had been hiding as a stowaway in the upper bunk of the sleeper listening to Hugh’s phone call with James.
It still amazed Hugh to think those Jenny episodes had occurred only a couple of months before.
“Yes,” Hugh said. “I do believe you have the resilience and smarts to drive truck.”
“Let’s stop at the truck plaza south of La Grande for lunch. I could log off for my thirty-minute break, the mandated nap time, and we can use the restroom and make some sandwiches.”
“Nap time?”
“Yeah. That’s another one of the brilliant ideas bureaucrats who have never dragged their fat asses into the cab of a truck have come up with for safety.” He had more than a little bit of angry, ironic tone to his voice.
“In their desire to control every minute of a truck driver’s life, they have decided we aren’t smart enough to know when we are tired and need to take a break. We can’t be on-duty driving in the log for more than eight hours without taking a break.”
“But, once again, they are completely oblivious to the unintended consequences of their meddling with truckers’ time. Not only is the thirty-minute break abused more often than not anyway, defeating the purpose of the rule, but truckers sometimes feel forced to drive unsafely to make up for the thirty minutes they lose out of their day.”
“Anyway, don’t get me started,” he said.
Hugh pulled into the truck plaza where they took care of business in the restroom, Jenny made up some sandwiches.
Charlie had returned to her desk in the early afternoon from an assignment. She punched the button on her desk phone to retrieve messages. She listened to a couple of inconsequential messages, but the one from Hugh had hit her hard.
“Charlie, this is Hugh Mann. We found out you think you are going to meet with us again and ride along with me in my truck. You need to know that no way, not no how is that going to happen. Don’t ever contact us again.”
The anger in Hugh’s voice was unmistakable.
That damn managing editor, and possibly John the news desk editor, had totally sabotaged her plan to schmooze Hugh into giving her another interview. She had planned to lay off him for a while, let him drive around a bit with his little blondie girl. Then, after a cooling-down period, she was going to contact him again in a non-threatening way.
That premature announcement in the revised version of her article shattered any ideas she might have had of an easy way to make the ride-along happen.
In Phoenix, Joe Montoya was on the phone with the attorney.
“Sure, boss,” Joe said. Bill Fishburn had asked Joe if he was making progress with their plan to stage a “killer” truck crash.
“We did a trial run today. It went perfectly. We’ll do one more practice tomorrow to make sure the gals have it down pat. Then we’ll launch it for real the day after tomorrow.”
“What about the husband? Is he completely on board with the plan?”
“Yeah, he’s aware of the extent of the injury that could be involved.”
“What kind of man would agree to a plan for his wife to be in a fatal car accident?”
“The kind of man who sees a boat load of dollars coming his way,” Joe replied. “And also a man who is bitter and hateful because she was sleeping around on him, and because she had two children that aren’t his.”
“Now consider this. When the two children are killed in the crash the whole plan could fall apart if the real father, or fathers, come forward and claim parental rights. They could file a wrongful death lawsuit with some other attorney for the children’s deaths, cutting us out completely. We need those kids so we can get our nuclear verdict,” the attorney said.
“Even if the children survive, they’re likely to be injured, and the father or fathers could file major injury claims on the kids’ behalf, cutting us out of it,” he added.
“I’ve already taken care of that,” Joe
