Hugh stepped to the front of the cab to peer out the windshield and side windows. He spotted Charlie walking toward his truck from the direction of James’ truck.
She was dressed in a new change of clothes, and had bags from a popular women’s chain store hanging from both arms. Hugh opened the passenger door for her to climb in, and helped her with her bags. He could tell she was freshly showered.
In contrast to the disheveled kidnap victim he had found sitting in the dirt by the side of the road, and who had been riding with him in his truck, Charlie looked very much like the fully composed reporter he and Jenny has first met.
“Good morning, Hugh.”
“Good morning, Charlie,” Hugh replied with a smile that grew into a full-on laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“You do realize what this looks like don’t you?”
“No. What?”
“When a gal hops down from one guy’s truck at a truck stop and climbs right up into another guy’s truck?”
“Sorry, I don’t get it.”
“We call them lot lizards,” Hugh explained. “Ladies who are paid by truckers to entertain them in their cabs.”
Charlie’s face turned red. She wasn’t blushing from embarrassment. Hugh could see she was angry.
Hugh couldn’t help himself. “Yeah, as you walked past a truck I saw a driver look in his wallet to see if he had enough cash. He must have figured the way you look he couldn’t afford you.”
“For crying out loud,” Charlie said. She was really angry. “What’s wrong with you people?”
“You people?” Hugh replayed her words back to her.
“Yeah, truckers.”
Hugh ignored that. “So, anyway. You got along pretty well with James then, huh?”
“We walked down the road a couple of blocks to a shopping mall. I needed quite a few things,” Charlie said, nodding toward her bags. “He fronted me the cash to pay for them.”
“And, then …?”
“And then we talked for a long time, until it was late. I didn’t want to disturb you coming back here, so I took the top bunk in James’ truck.”
Hugh said only, “Uh, huh.” But kept his thoughts to himself.
“Well, you look nice, with your new clothes, and all,” Hugh said, hoping to mollify Charlie’s anger.
Charlie snapped at Hugh, “I don’t need you to affirm my looks.”
There she is. There’s the Charlie Hugh and Jenny had first met in the Sandpoint restaurant.
Apparently, dressing down for a kidnapping didn’t suit Charlie at all. She obviously preferred her big-city, high-style investigative reporter persona.
Hugh decided to play it careful. After all, he was counting on her cooperation in dealing with the greater issue at hand – the lawsuit, and what the attorney’s plan B might be when he discovers his first ploy hadn’t worked.
Hugh decided he needed a plan B of his own in case things didn’t work out with Charlie. He began thinking about a couple of phone calls he could make in the near future.
Hugh’s phone map app told him his Portland destination was a little under nine hours of driving. That gave him some cushion, weather and traffic conditions permitting, to make the drive within his eleven hours of allowed drive time.
He had already traversed the short distance west on Interstate 80 to catch Highway 395 north.
“We’ve got to push it pretty hard,” he told Charlie.
The atmosphere in the truck’s cab was cooler than it had been since Charlie had first come on board. It was about what Hugh would have expected.
“It’s going to be close to do it all within my eleven if we encounter any slowdowns along the way.”
“Eleven?”
“Yeah. An hours-of-service regulation for commercial drivers. Under normal circumstances, I am allowed a fourteen-hour work day, within which I can be on-duty driving for only eleven of those hours. It’s a very strict rule,” Hugh said, patting the electronic logging device attached to his dash.
Charlie nodded her acceptance of Hugh’s explanation.
“So, what did you and James talk about last night?” Hugh asked.
“He told me quite a bit about when you and he drove together. Some really fascinating stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Like the first day when he picked you up hitchhiking.”
“What did he tell you about that?”
“Everything.”
“I don’t think everything,” Hugh said. James would know better than that. But, then again, James did like the ladies, and he found it easy talking to them.
“Hugh, it’s OK. I’ve promised I won’t write about anything I learn while I’m with you. I’ll keep my word.”
Hugh sighed his relief.
“But, it sure makes me wonder how Jenny was able to accept you had killed her dad. Not only accept, but fall in love with you.”
“You get right to it, don’t you.”
“Just curious.”
“It was something that grew over time, like in most relationships, I guess,” Hugh said. “She was angry for a while. But when she thought more about the kind of business her dad and her uncle had been in, and especially after they had made it their goal to kill me, she realized I did what I had to do in self-defense.”
“Now, why couldn’t you say these things during our first interview?” Charlie asked.
“Because that was on the record, and this is not. Right?”
Charlie nodded.
“There was one thing I wanted to ask James about,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“I wanted to ask him about that whole jug thing.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He said he’s the one who introduced you to using one. That it’s a lot more responsible to use a clean, deodorized jug emptied in a proper way rather than doing what a lot of truckers do who chuck soda bottle trucker bombs out
