A Perfect Shot

by Robin Yocum

  “Or at the bottom of a mine shaft.”

  “Exactly.”

  Three months after that conversation, and two days before the trial was to begin, Ronald Reynolds was packed and ready to board a private military transport plane for Pittsburgh. He would be driven to the courthouse under heavy guard and wearing a flak jacket. He was nervous but relieved that the entire ordeal would soon be behind him. Then, the phone rang in his cottage.

  “It’s been delayed again,” Kinnicki said, no longer bothering to identify himself. It was the third time the trial had been delayed.

  “For how long?” Ronald asked.

  “Could be a while—six months, maybe longer. Antonelli’s lawyers know he’s toast, so they’re stalling. They say he’s mentally unfit to stand trial, so they want to run a battery of psychological tests. The judge doesn’t want to give them any ammo for filing an appeal, so he’s giving the defense a wide berth.”

  Ronald said, calmly, “That’s disappointing.”

  “I thought you’d be upset,” Kinnicki said.

  “No use getting upset over things I can’t control.”

  The next day at lunch, Ronald walked to the base’s credit union and withdrew his savings—nearly thirty-two thousand dollars, which included the money he had plucked from Tony DeMarco’s money clip, three thousand dollars the FBI had given him when he was relocated, and everything he had saved while at the base. He then went back to the cottage and grabbed the two suitcases sitting just inside the front door.

  Good-bye, Fort Sam Houston.

  He wasn’t staying captive another minute. He slipped the cash inside the smallest of the suitcases, left the key on the floor, and beneath a noonday sun walked past the guard shack toward downtown San Antonio. Less than a mile down the road, he stopped at Newton’s Auto Sales, where he was greeted by a chubby salesman with mustard stains on the corners of his mouth. There was a 1984 Bronco on the lot that the salesman described as, “low mileage, very cherry, and a sweet deal for just sixty-six hundred.”

  After a brief inspection, Ronald said, “It’s been wrecked. There are grip marks on the frame, the driver’s side is full of body putty, and I’m reasonably certain the odometer has been rolled back. I’ll give you forty-four hundred, green money.”

  After a visit to the registrar for his license plates and title, and a stop to fill the gas tank, Ronald Reynolds was westbound on Interstate 10 before 3:00 that afternoon. For the first time in months, he didn’t feel a knot in the middle of his chest. It was a muggy, hot day in south Texas, but the hot air rushing through the open window was liberating. He didn’t have a map and had no idea where he was going to end up. It didn’t matter. He was behind the wheel of a Bronco, there was money in his pocket, and he had six months to explore the American West. He would drive until he saw something he wanted to investigate. If he stayed for an hour, fine. If he stayed for a week, that was fine, too.

  It was on the backside of eight o’clock when he stopped in Balmorhea for gas, a cheeseburger, and a Dr. Pepper. His adrenaline was at full throttle. The former Duke Ducheski felt like he had busted out of prison, and he wanted to put as much distance as possible between himself and Fort Sam Houston. The headlights of the Bronco cut through the Texas night as he headed into El Paso and turned north on I-25. The night air was clean in his nostrils, and the sky was wide with stars. He napped at a truck stop south of Albuquerque, awoke at seven, ate breakfast, and kept moving.

  Peggy was probably missing him for the first time. When he didn’t show up, she’d start asking questions. Someone would check the cottage, finding his clothes gone and the key on the floor. Then, someone higher up the food chain would call the FBI in Washington, who would call Kinnicki, who would have to tell the agent in charge and the prosecutor, who would absolutely lose their collective minds. Ronald was sorry that his departure was going to cause Kinnicki heartache, but he couldn’t stay put another minute.

  He stopped at a discount store west of Albuquerque and bought a small tent, a sleeping bag, a backpack, camping supplies, a .45-caliber revolver, and a box of shells. When he hit Flagstaff, Arizona, he turned north toward the Grand Canyon, where he rented a campsite and spent five days exploring. He finished each day refreshingly exhausted. The love handles began to melt. He hadn’t had a cigarette since leaving the fort. Dinner was fixed over a campfire, and he was asleep by eight o’clock. He awoke each morning sore and stiff, heated oatmeal over a fire, and headed out to the trails. When he awoke on the sixth day, he shaved off his moustache, neatly loaded his gear into the Bronco, and headed north. He stopped near Hatch, Utah, in the late morning and placed a collect call to Kinnicki.

  He choked back a laugh when the operator said, “Collect call from Ronald Reynolds. Will you accept the charges?”

  It took a few seconds for the alias to register with Kinnicki, who stammered for a second before blurting out, “Oh, Jesus, yes.”

  “Hey, my man, how are the Pirates doing?” Ronald asked.

  “The Pirates! Don’t talk to me about the Pirates. Where the hell are you? Jesus H. Christ.”

  “I’m alive and well and touring the great American West. You should go to the Grand Canyon, Kinnicki. You’d love it.”

  “I don’t want to hear about the Grand Canyon. Get your ass back to Fort Sam Houston. Everyone around here is going crazy. We’re in the middle of the bureau’s biggest organized-crime investigation in decades, and you’re gallivanting around the countryside. If you get killed, the entire investigation is in jeopardy.”

  “If I go back to the base, the investigation will definitely be in jeopardy, because I’ll die of boredom. I couldn’t stay there another day, Kinnicki. It was like being in a zoo. No one knows where I am or who I am. This is the best I’ve felt in months. I’m going to jump off the phone before you can trace the call. I’ll check in every couple weeks. Tell the prosecutor I’ve taken up skydiving, too. That ought to put his boxers in a bunch.”

  He drove up into Montana and South Dakota and down into Nebraska. At Kearney, he rented a room at the Blue Moon Motel, a rundown little place that charged a two-dollar deposit for his towels. He didn’t realize the Blue Moon backed up to the fairgrounds until the next morning, when the general clamor of the rodeo awakened him before the first bull was released from its pen. He had never seen a rodeo, and he had nothing but time.

  Wearing sunglasses, cargo shorts, a floral-patterned shirt, and tennis shoes, Ronald Reynolds looked wondrously out of place next to several hundred men in cowboy hats and spurs, their cheeks stuffed with tobacco. He stopped by a concession stand being run by a 4-H Club. A woman in cowboy boots and tight jeans had her back to Ronald, shoveling coffee into a paper filter.

  “Could I get a cup of that when it’s ready?”

  “You sure can,” she replied. Ronald was inspecting a tray of donuts when she turned around. He glanced up, then whipped his head back for a second look. She was tall—almost 5’11”—in her midthirties, with deep-blue eyes and short, wavy tendrils of chestnut hair that danced around her temples and ears. The creases around her mouth deepened when she smiled, which she did when she caught him doing a double-take.

  “Anything else?” she asked.

  “Uh, yeah, one of those cake donuts, please.”

  As she handed him the donut in a piece of waxed paper, he instinctively checked for a wedding band; there was none. “That’ll be fifty cents,” she said.

  He handed her a dollar and said, “That’s good.”

  He took a seat in the bleachers to watch the juniors in a barrel-racing competition. He had watched for twenty minutes when a woman said, “You don’t look much like a cowboy.”

  It was her.

  “I don’t?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Nothing about that floral shirt screams ‘cowboy.’”

  “What’s it scream?”

  “I’d have to go with ‘surfer dude.’”

  Ronald exhaled and looked away in feigned disgust. “I can’t
believe it. The guy at the tack shop said all the cowboys were wearing green-and-orange-and-teal floral shirts this summer.”

  She winced in mock sympathy. “I’m afraid he got you on that one, Tex.”

  He slowly shook his head. “Anything else?”

  “No spurs.”

  “Oh, I’ve got spurs. They’re in the car. I just didn’t want to get them dirty before it was my turn to ride one of those cows.”

  She laughed aloud and extended her hand, “My name’s Addie Mae.”

  “I’m Ron.”

  She smiled and held his hand a second longer than necessary. “Do you have someone in the rodeo, Ron?”

  “No. I just stopped by to watch. How about you?”

  Addie Mae pointed to a ten-year-old boy standing near the chute and looking very serious. “He’s competing in the juniors.” He had his mom’s dark hair and long legs, and he was doing his best to look the part, his thumbs hitched in his belt, chewing on a foxtail stem.

  “Good-lookin’ boy,” Ron said.

  “Logan Matthew. He’s my joy,” she said. “One of them. The other’s under that elm.” She pointed to a girl of fourteen who sat cross-legged, pulling apart blades of grass and looking bored. “Brooklynn Renée—she doesn’t know how to ride a horse and couldn’t care less. She likes basketball, of all things.”

  Ronald straightened up. “What’s wrong with basketball?” he asked.

  Addie Mae sensed the jab and smiled. “Where are you from, Ron?”

  “Here and there. Most recently, Texas.”

  “What brings you to Kearney?”

  “The rodeo.” He smiled; she didn’t. “I was just passing through. I stayed over at the Blue Moon last night. Do you want to know what I’ve learned about rodeos?”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s very difficult to sleep through one.”

  “I’m sure it is. Well, it was nice meeting you, Ron. I need to get back to the concession stand,” she said, turning to leave.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, hopping down out of the bleachers. “Listen, uh, Addie Mae . . . would you like to go to dinner tonight?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. No, thanks. I don’t really know you.”

  “I don’t know you, either, but I’m willing to learn.” She smiled. “It’s just dinner. Meet me somewhere, you pick it, and if I turn out to be a jerk, you can always leave.”

  She looked at him for a long moment and said, “Okay. There’s a steak house at Saint Paul and Winfield—Dom’s. It’s casual. I’ll meet you there at seven.”

  A friendly, handsome stranger rolls in from out of town, lands at the Blue Moon Motel in Kearney, of all places, decides on a lark to take in a rodeo, comes to Addie Mae’s concession stand, and she ends up on a dinner date. It was too bizarre. She drilled him with questions.

  “Where’re you from?”

  “Texas.”

  “You still don’t look like a cowboy.”

  “Not everyone in Texas is a cowboy.”

  “What’d you do in Texas?”

  “Civil service. Worked for the government.”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “Ever work for the government?” She shook her head. “I was bored to tears. I had some money saved. It was time to find something new.”

  “Uh-oh, Tex, wrong answer. So, you just pick up and leave whenever something starts to bore you?”

  “Generally not. This was a first.”

  “Uh-huh. Where’d you live before Texas.”

  “Near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.”

  “Wife?”

  “Ex.”

  “Kids?”

  “One. A boy. He died young.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. What was his name?”

  “Timothy. Timothy Ducheski.”

  “I thought your last name was Reynolds.”

  He stalled. “I’m sorry, what?”

  “You said your last name is Reynolds.”

  “It is; so was his. Timothy Ducheski Reynolds. Ducheski was my mom’s maiden name.”

  She nodded and seemed to accept the answer. “So, you quit your job, you had money in your pocket, and you decide to see the country and just happen to land in Kearney, Nebraska. That’s your story?”

  “That’s it,” he said. Her brows arched like two slinking caterpillars. “If the interrogation is over, maybe you could tell me a little about yourself.”

  Her name was Addie Mae Groat. She was raised on a farm outside of Netawaka, Kansas, and went to the University of Nebraska–Lincoln to study veterinary medicine. Her education was interrupted her junior year when she got pregnant to Jack Milnick, a middle-distance runner on the track team. They married and moved to Kearney, where he had gotten a job as a counselor with the juvenile court. Brooklynn was born the following December. Jack was not ready to be married. They struggled financially and argued continually. Shortly after her first meeting with a divorce lawyer, she learned she was again pregnant. Jack took a graduate-assistant position at the University of Missouri and never returned to Kearney. When the divorce was final shortly after Logan was born, she took back her maiden name. She was an office manager for a group of doctors and was five classes short of a business degree at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.

  The evening passed quickly. At 10:30, she said, “The kids are home by themselves. I need to go.”

  Ronald asked, “So, Ms. Groat, did I pass the audition?”

  She grinned and nodded. “You made the first cut.”

  This created a dilemma. He had been warned against developing friendships, and on the flight from Pittsburgh to San Antonio, Kinnicki said, “For the love of God, don’t fall in love.”

  “Why would that be so terrible?”

  “Because, when the dick gets hard, the brain gets soft. If you snuggle up to some woman, you better be dammed careful what you tell her. She tells one friend, who whispers it to her cousin, who tells her boss, who needs a favor from the union steward in St. Louis, who slips the information to a member of the mob. People start putting the pieces together, and pretty soon someone’s whispering into Joey Antonelli’s ear. And I assume you know what happens after that?”

  “Nothing good,” Ronald said.

  “That’s right, nothing good.”

  It was going to be a problem, because there was nothing about Addie Mae Groat that he didn’t like.

  Instead of driving out of Kearney as he had planned, he stayed on at the Blue Moon. After two more dates, he rented a furnished apartment near the university and took a job as a clerk in a local hardware store. He wore a red vest and a plastic name tag that said, “Ronnie.” It gave him time to figure out how he would eventually tell her about his past. He wanted to tell her the truth, but Kinnicki’s words always halted him.

  He had been in Kearney three months when he left to meet Kinnicki and the federal prosecutor in Omaha for two days of trial prep. The evening he returned, he met Addie Mae at their favorite Italian restaurant. Their dinners were being placed on the table when he asked, “Am I ever going to meet your kids?”

  “It depends,” she said.

  “On what?”

  “On if and when you ever level with me and tell me why you really came to Kearney. I’m very protective of my kids, Ron. Most of the men I’ve seen since the divorce never got through my front door, because I didn’t want to introduce my kids to a carousel of suitors. It must be obvious that I’m very attracted to you, but in my heart I know there’s a lot you’re not telling me. You work twenty hours a week in a hardware store, but you always have plenty of money. You’re vague about your past and why you’re here. Then, you disappear for two days and offer no explanation. Are you a drug dealer? Are you a Mafia hit man? Are you in the CIA? What? If this relationship is going to continue, I have to know.”

  “What if I can’t tell you?” he asked.

  “Can’t, or won’t?”

  “Maybe both.”

  “In that case, this relationship is over.”

>   She pulled her napkin off her lap, dropped it on the table next to an untouched plate of veal parmesan, and walked out. He caught up to her in the parking lot. As she reached for the door handle on her car, he jumped in front of her and blurted, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, please wait.” He put both his palms up. “A hit man or a drug dealer? You’re kidding me, right?” She crossed her arms and stared hard into his eyes, her lips squeezed into a tight ball. “Okay, you want the truth?” Her expression didn’t change. “Fine. I’ll give you the truth. Let’s go to my apartment. I can’t talk about it in a crowded restaurant.”

  “I’ll go to your apartment, but I’m telling you something, Ron. The first time my bullshit meter goes off, I’m out of there.”

  She sat on the couch while he got two wine glasses and a bottle of merlot from the kitchen. “I don’t want anything to drink,” she said.

  He set the glasses on the coffee table. “You will before the evening is over.” He gave himself a full pour and sat back on the couch, turning slightly toward her.

  “My name, the one I was born with, is not Ronald Reynolds. That’s my real name now, but for most of my life my name was Nick Ducheski—D-U-C-H-E-S-K-I. Everyone called me Duke. I’m not from Texas. I only lived there because the federal government was hiding me and trying to keep me from getting killed. Before that, I had lived my entire life in a little town along the Ohio River in eastern Ohio—Mingo Junction.

  “We had a fort—me and Moonie and Angel . . .”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Joey Antonelli and six of his capos were indicted on twenty-six counts of murder, racketeering, illegal narcotic sales, and a host of RICO statutes. There also were three indictments for corruption against Mingo Junction Police Chief Hinton Jaynes, who skipped bond and was later arrested while hiding out in a rented trailer in Lady Lakes, Florida. He died of a heart attack before he could be brought to trial. Two of Antonelli’s capos were turning state’s evidence, but the linchpin to the prosecution was the tapes—Joseph Antonelli at his boastful best, bragging about murders, ordering hits, and masterminding a huge drug, prostitution, and gambling operation.