NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be

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one last kiss

Copyright © 2012 by Michael W. Cuneo.

All rights reserved.

For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York,
NY 10010.

ISBN: 978-0-312-53972-6

Printed in the United States of America

St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / August 2012

St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth
Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 CH A P T E R ON E

Angela DeCicco and Don Weiss started dating in high school.

Angela was a sophomore and Don a senior. She was pretty
and petite. He was lean, handsome, and quietly reflective.
They lived in Berwyn, Illinois, which was located just
west of Chicago. It was a nice suburban community, with
busy shopping districts and neighborhoods of old brick bun-
galows. It was made up mostly of white ethnics: Italian, Pol-
ish, and Bohemian.
Angela was the youngest of eight children. Her family was
of Italian origin, one side from Naples, the other from Cal-
abria. Her father, Dominick, grew up in Chicago during the
Prohibition era. As a young man, he ran with a tough crowd
and reputedly had connections with organized crime. Upon
meeting Angela’s mom, Josephine, he learned that her father
had been abusing her. Dominick threatened the guy, saying
he’d kill him if he ever touched her again. The threat appar-
ently proved effective.
When Dominick proposed to Josephine, she said that she’d
marry him only if he stopped hanging out with gangsters
and got a steady job. He promised her that he’d go straight,
and he made good on the promise. Shortly after getting mar-
ried, he found a job as a printer for the Physicians’ Record
Company in Berwyn, where he ended up working for fifty
years.
14 M I C H A E L W. C U N E O

Don was the youngest of three boys. His paternal grand-

father was Jewish German, and his mother’s side of the fam-
ily, the Rutherfords, hailed from northeast Arkansas. His
father, Maurice, was a blue-collar guy with a lively mind and
boundless curiosity. He had worked for the same trucking
company in the Chicago area for more than twenty-five years.
His mother, Dortha, was a sweet and wholesome woman who
always tried to see the positive in people.
Angela got pregnant before the school year was finished.
Don graduated and landed a union job as an order picker at
a paint warehouse. It paid $4.75 per hour, which was decent
money at the time. They told their respective families about
the pregnancy and got married at the courthouse in down-
town Chicago on September 7, 1974.
Angela gave birth to a boy on February 11, 1975, when
she was still just seventeen. She and Don named him Mario.
They didn’t want Mario to be an only child, and so they were
thrilled when Angela got pregnant once again. This time they
had a girl, whom they named Sheri. She was born on July 3,
1977.
The family bounced around over the next several years,
switching apartments almost annually. They finally settled
into a nice place in Cicero, an old town located only seven
miles west of the Chicago Loop. Mario and Sheri loved it
there. They had Mexican friends, Italian friends, and Polish
friends. They’d play stickball in the street and spend hours
exploring the network of alleyways in their neighborhood.
Though scarcely older than a kid herself, Angela adapted
well to motherhood. She’d read to Mario and Sheri, take them
on outings, and involve them with projects at home. She en-
rolled them at Woodrow Wilson Elementary School in Ci-
cero, where she soon became a familiar face. She created a
PTA chapter at the school and started weekend fund-raisers
in the gymnasium. She organized the student vote whereby
the school’s sports teams became known as the Wilson
Dragons.
Angela also made certain that the kids didn’t have much
idle time on their hands. She signed them up for floor hockey
 ONE LAST KISS 15

and other sports. She put Sheri in the Girl Scouts and Mario
in the Boy Scouts, where he became a fixture on the roller
derby team. She encouraged them to join the school band
and saw to it that they put in the requisite hours of practice.
Mario played the trumpet, and Sheri the drums.
The two children mostly got along together, though they
were dissimilar in temperament. Mario was smart and artic-
ulate, with a brooding quality about him. He seemed like a
kid with things on his mind. Sheri was almost preternaturally
upbeat. She was a crowd-pleaser, the life of the party. She
was the sort of kid who seemed genuinely happy only when
everybody around her was also happy.
There’s an old family photograph of Mario and Sheri in
which they’re standing side by side in a doorway and wear-
ing Chicago White Sox T-shirts. He’s about nine years old,
and she’s seven. They both have dark hair, and they’re as
skinny as waifs. Mario is smiling, but the smile seems some-
how cautious, tentative. Sheri’s gap-toothed smile is as bright
as a summer morning.
As the older brother, Mario was always protective of Sheri.
Occasionally he was protective to a fault. One day Sheri ran
home and told him that a neighborhood boy had made her
cry. Mario went looking for the kid, marched him into an
alleyway, and beat the dickens out of him. Years later he fi-
nally got around to asking Sheri what the kid had done to
make her cry. She said that he’d kissed her.
Don Weiss left the paint warehouse after Sheri was born
and tried his hand at various technical service jobs. He
worked as a typewriter repairman for IBM in downtown
Chicago for several years, and in a similar capacity for a
smaller company for several more years. He then took a job
at the Chicago branch office of a data communications hard-
ware company that was based out of Largo, Florida. He even-
tually accepted an offer to work for the company in Florida,
which meant uprooting the entire family.
They moved to Largo on New Year’s Day, 1978. Mario
was twelve years old, and Sheri ten. It was a new and differ-
ent world for them. Located in the Tampa Bay area, Largo
16 M I C H A E L W. C U N E O

was a prototypical bedroom community, with none of the

urban charm to which they’d grown accustomed in Cicero.
The neighborhood where they now lived didn’t even have
sidewalks.
The transition was especially difficult for Mario, who was
rather a loner and didn’t make friends easily. He missed the
old gang in Cicero, the kids with whom he’d grown up and
played stickball in the street. He missed his beloved White
Sox and the occasional trips to Comiskey Park for a ball-
game.
It got a bit easier for Mario once he started high school.
He and a classmate became good buddies, and the two of
them would go bike riding all over town. One day they rode
to a restaurant where Mario was hopeful of landing a job. He
lied about his age and the guy who ran the place hired him
on the spot as a busboy. It proved the first of many jobs that
Mario would have as a teenager.
Sheri adapted without much fuss to the new life in Flor-
ida. She was more sociable than her older brother and so vi-
vacious that other kids sought her out for friendship. She
positively flourished throughout her mid- to late teens. She
was a cheerleader for the Largo High School Packers football
team. She played shortstop and second base for the school’s
varsity softball team. She threw right and batted left, and
was perhaps the team’s fastest player.
She thought that she might want to become a model, and
her mom and dad paid for her to attend the Barbizon school
of modeling in Tampa. She was certainly no less attractive
than any of the other girls in the school, but her tiny stature
proved an obstacle that even her zest and resolve couldn’t
overcome. She stood barely five feet tall.
Sheri was a huge fan of the Chicago Bulls basketball team
and absolutely adored the team’s superstar, Michael Jordan.
Her closet was full of Chicago Bulls jerseys, most of them
bearing Jordan’s signature number 23. In 1994, Jordan de-
cided that he’d also give baseball a shot. He signed with the
minor league Birmingham Barons, who were holding spring
training in Sarasota, Florida. Sheri made the three-hour drive
 ONE LAST KISS 17

to Sarasota for a preseason game, hopeful of meeting her

hero in person. Prior to the game, she purchased a bouquet
of flowers and asked a clubhouse attendant to give them to
Jordan. The attendant must have pointed her out to him, be-
cause afterward Jordan stopped his Corvette at the gate
where she was standing and rolled down his window. “Thank
you for the flowers,” he said. Sheri melted.
She had lots of friends, most of whom she’d met at school.
Her best friend was Tara Lintz, a beautiful young woman
with thick brown hair and an infectious laugh. Tara was in
the drama club with Sheri. Some people thought that she
showed real promise as an actress.
Tara had moved to Florida from Palisades Park, New Jer-
sey, when she was four or five years old. Sheri thought the
world of her, but Mario and Angela were less sure about her.
She struck them as aloof and superficial, and obsessed with
material success. She also struck them as being jealous of
Sheri and her more stable family situation. They wondered
if she was somebody whom Sheri could really trust.
Sheri got a job as a waitress at a Thai restaurant on Clear-
water Beach during the summer between her junior and se-
nior years at high school. When she wasn’t working, she’d
hang out on the beach with Tara Lintz and check out the guys.
Apart from maybe catching a Chicago Bulls game on tele-
vision, there was nothing that she enjoyed doing more. Mario
had graduated high school by this time and was driving a
1992 Camaro RS with a T-top. He got so tired of Sheri bor-
rowing it that he bought her a car of her own: a 1982 Chrys-
ler K-car for $850.
Sheri was seventeen now, and she’d blossomed into a real
beauty. She was petite and athletic, with lustrous dark hair
and fine features. She radiated joy and confidence. Ever the
protective older brother, Mario would half jokingly warn his
buddies against trying to make time with her. “You touch
her and I’ll crack your head open,” he’d say.
During her senior year at high school, Sheri’s happiness
was put to a severe test. Her parents’ marriage was falling
apart. The family home, once a place of peace and stability,
18 M I C H A E L W. C U N E O

was now fraught with bitterness and animosity. Don and An-
gela, once so happy together, were now at loggerheads. They
argued constantly, and bitterly. It seemed only a matter of
time before the marriage disintegrated completely.
Mario and Sheri blamed their dad. It was he who wanted
out of the marriage. It was he who was responsible for mak-
ing all of their lives miserable. There was a certain truth to
this. Don did indeed want out. It wasn’t another woman. It
wasn’t any one thing in particular. After twenty years, he sim-
ply thought that his marriage to Angela had run its course.
Time was passing him by and he wanted to set his life on a
fresh path.
Sheri graduated Largo High School in 1995 with a 3.35
GPA, and at roughly the same time Don and Angela formally
separated. Don moved out of the house and got his own
apartment, and divorce proceedings were set in motion. The
actual divorce wouldn’t be finalized for another year and a
half, but the entire process proved grueling for everyone.
Mario and Sheri thought that their dad had betrayed them.
They thought that he’d also betrayed their mom, who’d dedi-
cated her life to the marriage and the family. They weren’t
certain that they could ever forgive him.
Sheri worked as a waitress for a year or so after graduat-
ing high school. Then, out of the blue, she announced that
she’d decided to join the Air Force. She said that she was
looking for adventure, and that she also wanted to escape
the turmoil at home. She seemed to think that the Air Force
might be just the ticket for her. Mario tried to talk her out of
it. He seriously doubted that his little sister was cut out for
the highly regimented life of the military. He knew that he
himself wasn’t.
Sheri wasn’t about to be dissuaded, however, and in Sep-
tember 1996 she went to Lackland Air Force Base, on the
outskirts of San Antonio. Her mom and Mario visited her
there in November of the same year and saw her graduate
from basic training. Her dad tried to visit her also but she
refused to see him. Don realized that this marked a decided
 ONE LAST KISS 19

deterioration in their relationship. The communication lines

between them were now shut down almost completely.
After basic training, Sheri was stationed at the Marine
Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. There she was assigned to
the military police’s K-9 unit, which meant that she was re-
sponsible for handling a military working dog. She func-
tioned essentially as a police officer at Quantico, patrolling
the vast base with her German shepherd. She seemed to en-
joy the job, and in February 1997 she fell in love with a young
Marine who was also assigned to the K-9 unit.
The young Marine was Chris Coleman, a strapping
twenty-year-old who’d joined the Corps practically right out
of high school. In early September 1997, upon discovering
that Sheri had gotten pregnant, the couple decided that they’d
leave Quantico and start a new life together elsewhere. Else-
where was Randolph County in southwestern Illinois, which
was where Chris’s family lived.
 ONE  DOG  NIGHT

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