Bad Break: A Novel

Chapter Seventy-Two

Even as much of Chicago's South and West sides were experiencing change, what with rumors of a juvenile kingpin having been revealed and disappearing in the same week, word that two cops were missing, and the discovery of that missing girl, the congregants of Greater Cairo Missionary Baptist Church were accustomed to consistency and not accustomed to being rattled.

Some might call it sameness or monotonous, or even boring. But there had been a Willis behind the pulpit of Greater Cairo for more than fifty years, and that's the way it was meant to be.

It was no small surprise, then, when on a bright September Sunday morning, the Right Rev. Eldrick Willis announced from the pulpit that he would be retiring effective the conclusion of services and the ferret-like Asst. Pastor Donovan Baldwin would fill his shoes.

By pastoral standards, Willis was young – just fifty-nine. He had been married to the same woman since his sophomore year of college. And they had three, successful adult children. The sameness should have been working for Willis as well as it was for his congregation.

But he wanted to travel, he said. He had a different kind of story to tell and believed it needed to be in the form of a book. His mind was made up, he said.

And like newlyweds heading off on their honeymoon, Rev. and Mrs. Willis left Greater Cairo for the last time in the back of an Uber Black SUV. They settled in for the fifty-minute drive to O'Hare International Airport, clasped each other's hands and waved their free hands as their now-former congregants waved back, pensively.

First stop, Aruba.

Willis had heard that one could live well for a fraction of the cost in other semi-tropical places. So convinced was he that they would stay at least a few years, he had prepaid a three-year lease of a condominium on a golf resort at the northern tip of the island, near the legendary California Lighthouse.

Willis had even prepaid a year of course membership fees – withholding the final two years, in case it turned out he didn't like or simply wasn't very good at golf.

Never mind the fact that Aruba has an extradition treaty with the United States. The way Willis saw it, the tiny Dutch island colony couldn't be very different from the rest of the Western world: If you pay for things with cash or vaguely sourced accounts, you can be as anonymous as you'd like to be.

He thought of his good fortune, as their flight made its way to the tarmac – ninth in line for takeoff, according to the co-pilot – and wondered that he had taken a literal beating and had somehow reclaimed peace in his life.

If that didn't make him a spiritual leader, he thought, nothing did. After all, what man would be expected to turn the other cheek to the point he was forced to lie to his wife and employees and claim a mugging...by a masked attacker.

Spiritual leaders weren't perfect, he thought. They were human. But they were seers and soothsayers of sorts, and therefore deserving of some deference.

Imperfect, indeed. One of Willis's minor flaws was never complying when flight attendants instructed passengers to either turn off their mobile devices or place them in airplane mode.

Willis stubbornly reasoned that if a cell phone signal or even one hundred of them could throw a passenger jet off-kilter, then passenger jets shouldn't be allowed in the air.

Besides, even if the mobile device rule was based on legitimate science, it couldn't really matter until seconds before takeoff.

He thought of this as he hid his buzzing iPhone from a nosy flight attendant strolling by to make last-minute seatbelt checks. No sooner had she moved down the aisle though, did Willis whip out his phone. He readily admitted that when he wasn't preparing for a sermon, he had always been an addict of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. And since he was about to be airborne on a Wi-Fi-lacking flight for nearly five hours, he needed to know first what news was breaking.

"South Side Minister Indicted for Sexual Relationship with Minor – Taking Her Across State Lines for Lewd Acts."

The headline linked to a Chicago Daily Midway article with a familiar name atop it – Blake Wilson.

Mrs. Willis, already asleep against her husband's shoulder, was startled awake by the audible groans from other passengers, as their flight, now just third in line for takeoff, broke the queue and began taxying back to the terminal.