Chapter 6: First Client

At six in the morning Hana Lee bought me eggs at a diner on Eastern Avenue.

She wrote our contract on a napkin.

She wrote with a gel pen, in small furious capitals.

"Day rate, twelve hundred. Tour dates only. Nobody else touches my trucks."

"I'll send an invoice," I said.

"You'll send an invoice to who?"

I thought about it. "To whoever I am by Friday."

"You need a name."

"Dispatch."

"That's a call sign. It's not a company."

"It's the company," I said. "Dispatch Logistics."

She looked at me over her coffee, and the silver streak in her hair caught the diner light.

"You know what's weird?" she said. "Every man I've hired for this job needs to be impressed. You keep trying to get out of being paid."

"I'm not trying to get out of it. I'm trying to earn it."

"Same thing, to a lot of men."

"It's not the same thing."

She pushed the napkin across the counter.

"Sign it, Glasses."

"Sign it, Clipboard."

She grinned, and she had a dimple I hadn't noticed.

That night, back on Fenwick Street, I found out my sisters had already helped me three times.

I laid the evidence out on the kitchen table.

The first piece of paper was an email from a stranger at a trade magazine.

It said Chesapeake Media was proud to feature "the rise of Dispatch Logistics, Baltimore's newest freight disruptor."

"Mic," I said.

Mic held up both palms. "It's a profile. I didn't edit it."

"The company didn't exist until six this morning."

"A good profile gets ahead of the facts."

The second piece was a purchase order for sixty thousand dollars, from a client who'd never heard of me.

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