The Heir Who Mops the Floors

Sam Ortega, twenty-seven, mops floors on the night crew at Whitcomb Tower in downtown Dallas. Executives call him 'mop guy' and step over his bucket. Then one night, at 3:10 a.m., the late Amos Whitcomb's attorney is waiting for him in the sealed top-floor office, and she says his full name: Samuel Ortega Whitcomb. The grandfather who once left Sam's mother standing at his gate in the rain has left him Whitcomb Holdings, on one condition: one hundred nights with the same mop, and nobody can know. If anyone proves who he is before the hundredth night, everything goes to his cousin Preston. Preston has put a fifty-thousand-dollar reward on the heir, and now the whole building is hunting, Sam's own night crew included. Sam has no money and no power. He has the one thing every janitor has: people show him their real faces. This is a work of fiction; Whitcomb Holdings, its tower, its companies and its people are invented, and the details of the will are simplified for the story.