Free A Bad Day for Mercy by Sophie Littlefield

expression. “If I’d told you the truth, I mean you were saying it was hopeless already and all…”
    “But you say Benton wants five thousand dollars only!”
    “Natalya, believe me, if it was only five thousand dollars, it would have been done by now,” Chip said passionately, cupping her face in his hands. Stella had to suppress an “ewww” moment, considering where his hands had recently been, but Natalya gazed upon him with a fiery combination of anguish and adoration. “I’d’ve sold my car, my—my plasma, my sperm, whatever it took!”
    “Wait just a second here,” Stella demanded, resisting the urge to pry the pair apart to get their attention. “What exactly was the thirty thousand bucks for ?”
    “It’s this ass— uh, this guy,” Chip said, pointing a finger at the mess on the table. “It’s all his fault.”
    “He is husband,” Natalya sniffed, nodding.
    “He’s your husband ?”
    “Natalya came here as a, she came here from Russia to be a bride. Benton—this here’s Benton Parch—they met online and he brought her over and married her. But then she met me, and, well—”
    “He is bad man,” Natalya interjected hastily. “Bad husband. I am here almost two years. I work hard, I keep house. At first I try to make Benton happy, but he…” Her eyes filled with shining tears, but she wiped them impatiently away. “Is never good enough.”
    “ He did that to her,” Chip said darkly, pointing at her lips.
    “Wow,” Stella said. Never, in the years she’d seen a variety of bruises and lacerations and swelling and all manner of injury delivered at the hands of a man, had she seen anything quite like the swelling and malformation that marred Natalya’s otherwise appealing face. Her professional curiosity was piqued, and she leaned in for a better look. “How, though, is what I got to ask? I mean did he…”
    “Wait, I don’t mean he did that himself, ” Chip clarified. “He paid a guy to do it.”
    Even up close, Stella couldn’t see signs of laceration or bruising, just the swelling and a shiny patchiness to the lips, kind of like the fake leather on her knockoff Dooney & Bourke handbag. “Guy musta used something with a rounded edge…”
    “He use Botox, ” Natalya said. “Only not very good at it.”
    “Now honey,” Chip murmured soothingly. “It’s hardly noticeable.”
    Natalya beamed. “You see why I am fall in love with Chip—”
    Their eyes met and their mad romantic attraction threatened to propel themselves into each other’s arms again, so Stella held up a hand to keep their attention. “Your husband paid a guy to inject you? Not a doctor, I take it.”
    “He see picture in magazine, talk friend at work who his wife have Botox super cheap. Get phone number for practice doctor, we meet him when school is closed. Benton tell him what to do, he likes the big lips, big big, like model from Brazil.”
    “Do you know how many muscles and nerves there are around the mouth?” Chip demanded in a tone of outrage.
    “This doctor, he only has done the eyebrow before, the wrinkle, but Benton tell him go ahead. When this happen Benton find him after school one night, tell him he turn him in and he will never be doctor.”
    “Oh, he was a medical student, ” Stella clarified. “So your husband threatened to tell the AMA or whatever.”
    “Which is how this happened,” Chip sighed, ignoring Stella’s comment and gesturing at the partial corpse with the meat fork.
    “You mean, Benton threatened to report this guy so he … what, whacked him? And left him for you here to take care of?”
    “He want to make it look like I am killer. Shut up two birds with one rock. Benton is dead and now he think I am too scare to talk.”
    “How exactly did he kill him, anyway?”
    Natalya shrugged. “I don’t know. He is just dead.”
    “What, you mean there weren’t any marks on him? No injuries or wounds?”
    “Nothing,” Chip agreed, “and since we stripped him