Free All Due Respect Issue 2 by David Siddall, Scott Adlerberg, Joseph Rubas, Eric Beetner, Mike Monson

then up to his face, wet with tears.
    “You finally went and did it, huh?” She shook her head and clucked her tongue at him. All Roger could do was sob. He wiped his nose with the back of one bloody hand and smeared a red streak across his left cheek.
    “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
    She put an arm around him and pushed him inside, clear of the door. She peeked out into the hallway in both directions to make sure there were no busybodies like Mrs. Eastway in the hall.

    It had been a good fifteen minutes since Roger came home. She’d bathed him, bundled his bloodstained clothes and wrapped them in twine, refilled his brandy glass and given him what she thought to be ample time to calm down.
    “So, what happened, Roger?”
    He began crying all over again.
    Dottie put her palm over her eyes. Weak. The man she’d married was weak. Even killing another man was no act of strength or bravery. It was weakness. Roger couldn’t take the way Mr. Zucco treated him down at the market, so he’d taken the coward’s way out.
    Dottie admitted it had to be tempting—to spend all day with a meat cleaver in your hand thinking murderous thoughts about your boss and not take action.
    He gathered himself enough to tell a rambling, sob-wracked recounting of one insult too many, one extra joke about his being Polish, one final inappropriate comment about Dottie.
    She hated when Roger tried to defend her “honor.” She could damn well defend herself if she needed it, and her honor was too far gone to need defending anywhere but at the pearly gates. Dottie had never met a good time that didn’t like her right back.
    Roger knew it when he married her. Everyone else in town knew it well before then.
    But it drove Roger crazy. The things Mr. Zucco would say about her, about her past, about what she might do for the right amount. And him with a perfectly attractive wife of his own. The cleaver finally did what Roger had been thinking of doing for months.
    Now I have to clean it up, Dottie thought.
    It wasn’t even that she was against him killing Zucco. The bastard deserved it, sure enough. She felt his eyes on her, heard the whispers. But Dottie didn’t trust Roger as far as she could throw him on matters of even small importance. Covering up a murder? That was a tall order.
    “What did you do with the body?” she asked.
    “I left him there.”
    Dottie rolled her eyes. “Did you at least take the cleaver and dump it somewhere?”
    Roger shook his head like a scolded child.
    “Roger,” she said, “tell me it’s not still in him.”
    He stared at his socks, his shoes bundled with the rest of the blood-spoiled outfit.
    Dottie sighed as she stood. “I’ll be right back.”

    The scene was as Roger described. Zucco lay on the floor of the butcher shop’s back room. She’d used Roger’s key to enter after business hours. The cleaver leaned at an angle with a corner of the blade wedged into Zucco’s sternum. Only a sliver of white could be seen on his butcher’s apron, his own blood mixing with the day’s usual flotsam of butchered meat juices. Other tears in the fabric of his shirt showed there were several blows before the cleaver got stuck in the bone.
    Dottie went to the row of three lockers on the back wall and took out a clean apron, tied it on, and began to clean up.
    An hour later, she returned to their tiny apartment above the shop.
    Roger was there, hugging his knees to his chest and crying. A small swirl of brandy spun at the bottom of his glass as he rocked forward and back, but she noticed the bottle on the windowsill was empty.
    He’s not going to make it, she thought. He’s going to crack up.
    She walked past him into the kitchen and got down the bottle of whiskey. There were about three fingers left and she poured all three.
    “Roger?” she said from the kitchen. She heard only his quiet sobs. She took a drink. “Roger,” she said a little louder. He didn’t respond.
    Dottie downed