Who: Jude C & 'Sparrow'
What: Hitching a ride
When: Late afternoon
The car was low-slung. It felt lower, because the seats sagged on their infrastructure and the seat covers were wrinkled, and littered with crumbs. (Oliver. Jude didn't
eat in his
car, thank you very much.) There was a metallic kind of thud and rattle if the speedometer ticked past forty and the wind outside whistled through the gap in the permanently-cracked window, like an overly optimistic attempt to catch a breeze.
Still. It worked. And that was, Jude thought with his elbow on the door and the wheel loose in his fingertips, enough. Wasn't it? The car gave an apologetic cough of fumes through a dangling-drunk fuse pipe but ticked on toward the on-road back to the highway. Jude periodically took a tiny roadtrip toward the city: to keep them in funds, to check in on the news and to identify any opportunities that might have arisen in the gap between one trip and the next. And it wasn't as if the roads were lined with people between town and city. Repose was out of the way. That was the beauty of running a con from a small town.
Except there
was someone on the verge. Literally. Grass beneath her feet, rail at her knee. The rattle-sick car slowed. The window rolled a little lower and an investigative head, topped with wildly messy hair, leaned out.
"Excuse me." Experimentally. Pleasant voice. Friendly, even. "Are you going someplace?" She
looked harmless. Not that you could tell. Jude had a sudden (visceral) memory of throwing-out time at the bar before this one. No, you certainly couldn't tell. But harmless, on the side of the road. Chances of being screaming-drunk, not high.