Before sunup I shut the iron door over the floor cavity and shoved the workbench back across the concrete seam.

By eight in the morning the main boardroom at Sullivan Trucking was already warm enough that I could smell the shoe polish on the three corporate buyers sitting across from me.

Tiffany sat on my left in a cream linen suit that looked like it had come straight out of a boutique window.

She had three leather-bound proposal folders lined up neatly on the mahogany table.

“Our third-quarter projections show freight volume up twelve percent along the Memphis corridor,” I said, laying my hand flat on the table.