Short of a major steel or stone structure directly between you, and assuming both of you have outside tower antennas, you should be able to talk 12 miles easy.

At one time, I was really big into CB, shortwave and such, and we had a decent group around here, but once local internet access came to town, it died off.

Here's an old photo from 1993 of my "station", with CB's (base & handheld, scanners and TV and shortwave.)
I even had a marine battery setup to run everything but the computer if the power went out.



I kinda miss my CB days.