The Long Money

Five Black women. One San Francisco firm. Forty-two businesses waiting on a light switch. And a buyer from nowhere who knew their number before they did.Camille Pierre walks into a Houston auction with five signatures behind her and a ceiling of sixty-one cents. She loses the land by half a cent, to a company formed five weeks earlier and named for a creek the city buried.The land is fourteen parcels at the north end of Third Street, and across one of them runs the sixty yards of easement the whole corridor needs for power. Without it, a seamstress who has kept her shop on Third Street since 1979 never gets her new door, and a bank can call sixty-four million dollars on the first of May.Then the paper starts coming. A lapsed easement. A poison map. A photograph of a state senator on Camille's front steps. And a broker who held the winning phone calls Camille at 9:40 one night to say he finally knows whose money it was. By morning he is at the bottom of a garage stairwell.Somebody knew the number. Zara has a wall, a list, and a rule against wanting two pieces to match. Reign has a model with every week until April in its own row. Nova has a woman in Houston she knows the name of and cannot touch. And Camille has her grandmother's word for what you stand on when the water comes up.Fast money leaves you anyway. This is the long kind.Book Three of Money, Loyalty & Smoke. Start with Smoke Signals and Blood Money, or start right here.