Odell Prentiss

Sits on the Belmar Association's board and takes the meetings nobody else wants.

When somebody wants to buy something off the Belmar Association, Prentiss is who the board sends. He is a troll, thirty-three, and works days as a leasing agent on Colorado Avenue, which is where he learned to read a contract for a living. People who have only heard the description are routinely wrong about which half of him does the work.

His grandmother's house was inside the I-10 cut. He states that in one sentence at the top of every meeting, before anyone else can bring it up.

What he is good at is the arithmetic underneath an offer: whose parcel it needs, what it is worth if the registry fight is won outright rather than settled, and which of the three hundred households the buyer has already been to. Pike has sat across from him twice. Both times Pike named a number and left without an answer.

What the crew knows#

• He will tell you what a corporation is actually buying, which is usually not the thing described on the paperwork. He reads an offer out loud, clause by clause, at length.
• He keeps a list of which households have been approached and by whom. It is not a secret and he will read from it.
• Nothing closes in the room. It goes back to the board and to Reece, and he opens with that rather than producing it at the end.
• He is polite to people he has decided are wasting his time, and it is audible.
• Nobody has ever needed to explain the room to him, and a few buyers have tried, on the assumption that the large person at the end of the table was there to carry something.

Contact#