She Hired My Company to Haul Her Late Father’s $900,000 Car to Arizona in Five Days. Then She Climbed Into My Cab

“I’m riding with it,” she said. “That’s not a question.”

I looked at the woman standing in my office in Baltimore. Forty-five, maybe. Gray wool coat, dark hair in a no-nonsense bun, a schoolteacher’s posture and a car title in her hand like a weapon.

“Ma’am, my drivers don’t take passengers. It’s an insurance thing.”

“Then you drive it.”

My dispatcher snorted into her coffee.

I’m Colter Dunmore. Forty-seven, divorced, and the owner of Dunmore Enclosed, forty trucks that haul the most expensive cars in America from one rich garage to another. Classics. Race cars. Things people insure for more than houses. I started with one truck and a lot of nerve. I haven’t driven a load myself in ten years.

“What’s the car?” I asked.

“A 1963 roadster. Silver-blue. My father bought it in 1971 and restored it himself. He died in March.” She swallowed. “Audra Bellweather. I teach high school chemistry.”

“And where’s it going?”

“The big collector auction in Scottsdale. It has to be there by Saturday morning for inspection, or it gets bumped to next year.”

“Why not wait for next year?”

She set the title on my desk.

“Because the estate owes the IRS four hundred thousand dollars by the end of the month,” she said. “If that car doesn’t sell on Saturday, they take my father’s house.”

I looked at the title. At her hands, holding it flat on the desk so I wouldn’t see them shake.

“Five days,” I said. “Twenty-three hundred miles.”

“Can you do it?”

I picked up my keys.