A Perfect Shot

by Robin Yocum

  Duke walked toward the kitchen, which was separated from the taproom by two swinging, stainless-steel doors with windows shaped like half-moons. It was through one of the small windows that he saw the back door to the alley cracked open six inches, and his gut constricted.

  “Moonie, are you here?” he called.

  The bar was quiet. Duke walked into the kitchen, pulled the door closed, and turned the deadbolt, then walked back through the taproom and through the opening to the dining room. It had been mopped and cleaned. The clack of his heels against the hardwood floor echoed in the empty bar.

  “Moonie!”

  No response.

  As he turned into the hall leading to his office, Duke saw blood, a thick river of maroon that reflected in the dull glow of the hall light. “Oh, Christ, Moonie,” he said, dropping on his knees at his friend’s side.

  In the dim light, he strained to see the damage that was pulling the life out of his friend. There were bullet wounds in both knee caps. The front of his shirt and pants were sticky and red. Blood was everywhere. Moonie opened his eyes to slits, but there was no expression of recognition. There was just a slight rise and fall to his chest. Duke ran to his office and called 911.

  “I need an ambulance at Duke’s Place on Commercial Street, and you’ve got to hurry,” he yelled. “My friend has been shot and it’s very bad.”

  The 911 operator was asking more questions, but Duke dropped the phone. He unlocked the front door, then dashed back down the hall. “Moonie?” He put a hand on his carotid artery. The beat was faint. “Moonie? It’s me, Duke. Can you hear me?”

  Slowly, his eyes opened again. “Hey, Duke.” He swallowed and grimaced. “Man, I’m so sorry about this . . .” He struggled to breathe; his words were barely audible. “It’s a mess; I’m sorry.”

  “Moonie, for God’s sake, don’t worry about this. You’re going to be all right, buddy. The emergency squad’s on the way. Who did this to you?”

  “You were right all along. That Rhino, he doesn’t sell flashlights; he’s bad news. He said . . .” Moonie closed his eyes, swallowed hard, and winced. He licked at lips caked in dried blood. The lower lip was swollen and blue, a split in the skin was covered with darkened blood. “I don’t think I’m going to make it, Duke.” His eyes slid shut. The siren on the emergency vehicle echoed off the buildings along Commercial Street as it came out of the station house a block to the north.

  “Moonie?”

  Again, and as though with great effort, his eyes opened. They were dry and distant, dull marbles barely able to focus. They reminded Duke of the remote, unknowing look in Timmy’s eyes. “Rhino must have . . . let him in the back door . . . after we closed.”

  “Who? Who’d he let in?”

  “DeMarco. . . . You were right about him, too. He brought a gun, a big one with a silencer. He shot me in the knees first. . . . Kicked me in the face.” He swallowed. “I couldn’t do anything but take it. He kept asking what I’d done with the money, but I didn’t tell him. . . . I told him I didn’t have it, that I . . . I never had it.” He winced and took several breaths, each getting shorter than the one before. “It’s in our secret place—the safe where we kept the Cokes. Remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “You keep it, Duke. Don’t give it to that . . . rat bastard.”

  Tears began rolling down Duke’s face as the life drained out of Moonie’s. “No. You’ll need it when you get out of the hospital. It’ll be there for you.”

  “You keep it, Duke.”

  He closed his eyes as the front door banged open. Duke jumped out of the way as the first medic ran into the hall. He looked at Moonie, then briefly up at Duke, then he dropped down and ripped open the front of Moonie’s shirt. “He’s lost a lot of blood,” the medic said. Another medic wrapped an oxygen mask around Moonie’s face. As they lifted him to the stretcher and started carrying him out of the restaurant, Moonie looked up at his old friend. He seemed to smile, a little, or perhaps it was his face relaxing before his journey, and he closed his eyes a final time.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  It was a good day to bury his best friend.

  It was day as night in the valley, a time when the sun was screened from sight and streetlights burned at noon. The March sky was low and overcast, a malty mix of smoke and clouds, wisps of gray death that straggled in the wind and clung to the bare limbs. The mist was cold and constant, chilling to the bone those standing on a hillside of grass, deadened brown by the winter winds.

  Yes, it was a good day to bury his best friend. Duke would have hated to see Moonie put in the ground on a clear and sunny day, a day that was good for living and one that Moonie would be sad to know he had missed. A day, perhaps, when he could have jumped on the Indian and driven for hours on the asphalt country roads that snaked west out of the valley. That would have seemed most unfair. Moonie had always enjoyed the little things—sunshine, drift fishing, iced beer on a sunny afternoon, the smell of Isaly’s coffee. Duke had spoken of these small pleasures at the funeral. He kept his remarks brief, beginning them with: “We had a fort—me and Moonie and Angel . . .”

  Duke didn’t speak of the tragedy that felled his friend, but he talked instead of the wonderful friend he had lost.

  “My dad used to say, as you go through life, if you have one friend, one true friend, you’re lucky. He said a lot of people would claim to be your friend, but where were they when times were tough and the chips were down? I have been blessed in this life because for the first forty-one years, I’ve had two—Angelo Angelli and Moonie Collier. Now, of course, I have only one. I consider myself lucky to have had Moonie Collier as a friend. When we were younger and my mouth got too bold for my body to back up, Moonie was my protector. Moonie’s friendship was unconditional. What more could you ask of another human being? I’ll never be able to replace him, and I will miss him terribly.”

  The American flag covering the casket was dampened by the mist by the time Duke and the other pallbearers carried Moonie from the gravel road to the green tent that covered the hole where he would spend eternity. The wind tore at their bare hands, and Duke was glad to set the casket on the canvas straps of the lowering crane. Just beyond the casket, a festoon of roses that Duke had purchased stood propped on a thin wire stand. A funeral-home employee stood behind the roses, keeping it upright against the wind, which had whipped the arrangement and torn it apart at the bottom. Ironically, it had taken on the shape of a horseshoe, and that made Duke smile.

  Moonie’s mother and her aged mother, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and was still unsure who was being buried, sat alone in the only chairs under the tent. Twice before the preacher could say the final prayer, the older woman loudly asked, “Who’s in there? Who died?” Moonie’s mother, looking wan and weak, didn’t answer.

  The cemetery at New Alexandria stretches across the side of the tallest hill in the area and is known simply as Cemetery Hill. (Coincidentally, it was just beyond the crest of the hill, maybe a quarter-mile, where the body of the Troll was spending eternity in the trunk of his Lincoln, submerged in the quarry.) On days when the wind was rolling in from the west, like this day, the gales snaked along the side of the ridge and unleashed over the hilltop. The squalls battered the tent, and its ornamental flaps cracked like whips, snapping in succession. Around the tent stood forty men, the black grit of the steel mill ground deep into their hardened hands and the creases of their faces. They hunched against the wind in ill-fitting suits that were worn at funerals and on Easter Sunday.

  The wind all but drowned out the preacher, who again prayed for Moonie’s soul and peace for his mother. The honor guard of Mingo American Legion Post 351 offered a twenty-one-gun salute, a local high school boy played “Taps,” and a square-jawed man in dress blues presented the flag to Mrs. Collier. The preacher announced that those in attendance were invited to an open house at the Colliers’, and it was over.

  As Duke walked to his car, his eyes red and
moist, he turned one last time to look at the bronze casket. Angel put his arm around his friend’s shoulder and led him away.

  The steelworkers and friends of Moonie Collier in attendance ended up at Duke’s Place. Duke hadn’t planned to reopen the restaurant until the following day, but it was the logical gathering place. He ordered three trays of Sicilian-style DiCarlo’s Pizza from the parlor in downtown Steubenville, and opened the beer cooler and the cash drawer, trusting this brotherhood to the honor system. The steelworkers toasted Moonie and traded stories of his escapades, his incredible ability to throw a baseball, and the senselessness of his death.

  “Why would you kill someone for a few hundred bucks?” one steelworker asked, commenting on the common assumption that Moonie had been killed in a robbery attempt.

  “Because he was probably giving them the fight of their putrid lives,” another said. “They probably had to shoot him before he tore them to pieces.”

  They talked about Moonie and asked Duke to retell a legendary story. It occurred when they were twelve and feuding with the South Side Commandos. After the Commandos made a nighttime raid and spray painted Fort Logan with, “Komanddos are Number 1,” Moonie surveyed their handiwork and said, “I have a plan.”

  Inspired by a battle scene in the movie Spartacus with Kirk Douglas, Moonie stole an empty fifty-five-gallon oil drum from the Pennsylvania Railroad yard, and rolled it to the fort. He used a spool of No. 9 wire to wrap the barrel in newspapers, dried grass and weeds, and oil-soaked rags. On the day of the battle, he lugged a five-gallon can of gasoline to the fort, then sent Angel to challenge the Commandos to a frontal assault on Fort Logan This was nearly impossible because the fort sat atop a steep precipice. Militarily, only a fool would attack the position. Fortunately, the Commandos were led by just such a person—Stevie Bipp. Stevie was a pudgy kid who swore a lot and habitually spit streamers out the gap between his front incisors.

  By the time he found the Commandos in their tree fort, Angel was a stuttering wreck. “H-h-hey, y-you g-guys are a b-bunch of p-p-pussies for attacking at n-night,” Angel yelled. “Y-y-you d-don’t have the g-g-guts to attack in the d-d-day.”

  Stevie Bipp laughed and mocked Angel. “F-f-fuck you, you s-s-skinny, little p-prick,” he said. “I’ll k-k-kick your ass the n-n-next time I c-c-catch you.”

  Frustrated by their lack of action and angered by the mocking, Angel went for the jugular. “H-h-hey, B-Bipp, this is y-y-your m-m-mom.” Angel grabbed hold of an imaginary erection and began working it in and out of his mouth, pressing his tongue against the inside of his cheek for added effect.

  “You’re dead, Angelli,” Bipp yelled as he climbed down the tree.

  “I g-g-got to g-go. I g-got a d-d-date with your m-m-mom,” Angel yelled as he sprinted back to the safety of Fort Logan.

  Soon, Bipp and four Commandos were huddling behind the scrub brush at the bottom of the hill. They lobbed rocks at Fort Logan, but made no move at attack. Meanwhile, Moonie was dumping five gallons of gasoline on the rag-and paper-covered drum. “Insult his mother again,” Moonie said.

  Angel walked out the front opening of the fort and yelled, “H-h-hey B-Bipp, do you h-hear that?”

  “I don’t hear nothin’, you stuttering moron.”

  “L-l-listen. D-don’t you h-h-hear that wh-whistle? It’s the t-t-train we’re going to p-pull on your m-m-mom.”

  “Charge!” Bipp yelled, leading his Commandos up the hill. As they neared the halfway mark up the hill, Moonie climbed to the parapet of stone and dirt in front of the fort and yelled, “I am Spartacus!” He lit an entire pack of matches and dropped them on the gasoline-soaked drum. Flames erupted fifteen feet above the barrel and knocked Moonie back into the fort. He ran back to the parapet and kicked the barrel down the hill. It was a spinning, bouncing ball of fire that roared toward the scattering Commandos.

  Moonie raised both hands high and yelled, “I am Spartacus. I am Spartacus.”

  Duke said, “Hey, Spartacus, you just set the hillside on fire.”

  There were twenty or so small fires directly in front of Fort Logan, and a grand blaze in a dead cedar bush. Gas-soaked rags and paper were flying off the barrel as it tumbled down the hill. It had been a dry summer, and the desiccated ground cover easily ignited. They watched, slack-jawed, as the barrel continued, burning its way through the undergrowth. As they ran down the hill and tried to stomp out the smaller fires, the soles of their tennis shoes melted and little pebbles melded into the soft rubber. A gust of wind pushed the blaze from the cedar bush into a grove of pines. The blanket of dried needles under two trees exploded in flames—ba-whoosh, ba-whoosh. Soon, the entire hillside was in flames. The billowing smoke lifted above the West Virginia hills and could be seen in Pennsylvania. It burned most of the hillside between Mingo Junction and Steubenville, and it took seven fire departments to put it out. Miraculously, Fort Logan was spared.

  Like the warrior he was, Spartacus fell on his sword, took all the blame, and spent three days in the Jefferson County juvenile detention center. For years afterward, firemen in Mingo Junction called Moonie, “Spark-tacus.”

  Back at Duke’s Place after they’d put Spartacus to rest, it was past midnight when all the boys finally cleared out. Leopold “Big Czech” Meisel was the last to leave. He was more than a little drunk, and Duke knew he shouldn’t let Leo drive, but it wasn’t worth the fight he would put up. Duke stood outside the restaurant until the taillights of Leo’s car disappeared at the underpass. He lifted the black wreath from the door and went back inside, dead-bolting it behind him.

  It was quiet in the restaurant except for the din of the steel mill, a muffled groan so constant that it was no more noticed by the people of Mingo Junction than was the brown water of the Ohio or the stone façade of the foothills. It was, simply, something that was always there, a sign that despite Moonie Collier’s death, life continued in the Ohio River Valley.

  Duke turned off the overhead lights, leaving the florescent tubes to burn under the rim of the bar, and grabbed a beer from the cooler. He eased onto a stool at the end of the bar and stared at his image in the mirror, slowly rolling the bottle between his palms. Duke’s Place had long been his dream; now, he didn’t know if he would ever again look at it the same way. How could he? Every time he walked to his office, he would step on the spot where Moonie took his last breaths. He couldn’t pass it without seeing the real and the imagined—the very real bloodstains that had soaked into the wooden floor, and the ghostly image of Moonie Collier, more dead than alive, sprawled in the hallway. After the police had finished their investigation of the crime scene, Duke tried to remove the stains, but that section of floor had yet to be sealed, and the wood drank in the blood. Even in the darkness of the hallway, Duke could see the outline of the stain. In the darkness of his mind, he could see Moonie more clearly than the blood.

  He longed to be with Cara. He would lock up the restaurant and go to her house, take her in his arms, bury his face in her neck, breathe in the scent of her hair, and never let go. No longer did he have any concern for Nina, her feelings, or her murderous brother. They could all go to hell. With two long gulps, he finished the beer, then scooped the haphazardly stacked bills from the cash register and put them in the safe. As he reemerged from the darkened hall and cut behind the bar, Duke jumped when a figure emerged from the hazy light of the kitchen.

  A charge of adrenaline boiled in his spine and exploded through his arms and legs like thousands of icy needles. His hands instinctively curled into fists that he drew chest-high. He hadn’t taken a breath before he recognized the distinct silhouette of Tony DeMarco.

  “Relax, Duke,” he said, walking into the glow of the fluorescent bar lights. “I heard you were having a little impromptu wake for your pal Moonie. Me and the boys were just coming over to pay our respects.” He looked around the empty bar. “But, uh, looks like the party’s over.”

  Two men in dark sport coats over sweaters stepped out of the kitchen an
d stood in the shadows behind him. One Duke had never seen before—a fat-faced thug with oily hair and a soft gut that lapped over his belt. The other he recognized. It was the man Moonie had known as Rhino. “I’m assuming you know at least one of my associates?” Tony said.

  “Yeah, but I’m not in the market for any key chains.”

  Tony pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. “Why don’t you boys wait in the car? I’ll only be a minute.” They didn’t like it; the fat one had his eye on some of the leftover pizza, but they did as they were told. After the two henchmen had disappeared into the kitchen, Tony stood at the far end of the bar and opened a gloved hand, revealing a brass key; he slid it down the bar top toward Duke. “You should be more careful with your keys, Duke. You leave these things lyin’ around, anyone could get in here.”

  “Yeah, I guess you never know what kind of riffraff might wander in.”

  Tony grinned and began pulling off his gloves, one finger at a time. “I guess you know where I got that one.”

  It was Moonie’s back-door key. Duke fought back the rage, the urge to go on the attack. It would be a fatal mistake that Tony was no doubt hoping he would make.

  “What do you want, Tony?” he asked.

  “What? A guy can’t pay a social visit to his brother-in-law without wanting something?” He moved toward Duke and opened the box of DiCarlo’s Pizza on the bar. He picked out a now-cold square with crust and took a bite. “Man, I love this stuff. This is the best pizza in the world.”

  “I’m sure they would appreciate your endorsement. ‘Hi, I’m Tony DeMarco. And when I’m not killing innocent men or selling drugs to your children, I enjoy a good DiCarlo’s Pizza.’”

  He did not think Tony was capable of such speed. No sooner had the words left Duke’s mouth than Tony’s thick forearm was full across his neck, and he was pushed backward into the beer cooler. Duke’s nostrils filled with the stale odor of liquor and tomato sauce. A pair of deadly serious brown eyes were inches from his.