A Bad Day for Mercy

by Sophie Littlefield

  “Gimme that,” she said, snatching back her phone and knocking Todd on the head with it before turning her attention back to Sherilee. “It’s me again. Look, I’m going to take good care of him, I promise.”

  “Is he over at your place?”

  “Uh … well, not exactly. In fact we’re sort of out of town. It’s kind of complicated.”

  “Oh no, you ain’t up at Fayette, are you?” Fayette, the county seat, featured the county jail, among other things. The sheriff’s department’s temporary holding cell in Prosper had been fashioned from an old Dumpster enclosure, so most suspects didn’t cool their heels there for very long before being sent north.

  “No, no, nothing like that. Todd ain’t done anything illegal that I know of.” Although at that moment Stella remembered seeing Goat’s cruiser—which she had foolishly believed had been evidence he was looking out for her—but could easily have been a pursuit-type situation involving Todd.

  “You mean, ’cept what he done to Royal’s car. Oh, that man was spittin’ nails.” Stella could hear the frustration in Sherilee’s voice, and she had the thought that having to be the go-between between one’s son-of-a-bitch ex and one’s own kids was yet one more layer of hell that a single mother didn’t deserve but was often stuck with anyway.

  “He’s still mad about that? Didn’t insurance pay to repaint?”

  “Yes, but I’m talkin’ about what Todd done today. Royal come over after work to drop off the check and practically invited himself in and what am I gonna do about that, the girls are so excited to see their daddy, so I set out some cookies and what-all and didn’t even give it a thought when Todd told me he was headed over to Taylor’s. Keepin’ him apart from his dad seemed like a good idea, in fact. And then when Royal saw what Todd done, and right on that fresh paint what he paid extra to get the waterborne finish—”

  “Oh, no,” Stella said, her heart sinking. She stared at Todd, who realized he’d been found out. Rather than slinking further into remorse, though, he stood up tall and jutted his chin angrily forward, sparks practically flying from his long-lashed eyes. Yes, he’d done it for sure—and he wasn’t sorry.

  That was a whole other type of problem, one she’d best sort out away from his mother.

  “What did he write this time?” she asked heavily.

  “Well, it was kind of like last time when he run outta room,” Sherilee said. “From the driver’s side it said I SUCK in big old red letters but then you round the corner and it said … uh, something else.”

  Stella bit her lip, deadly curious but not about to pry, not with the sort of night that poor Sherilee was having.

  She didn’t have to. “BALLS,” Sherilee whispered. “That’s what was wrote across the back. I SUCK BALLS. Oh, that sure did make Royal mad. He called the sheriff up straightaway, even after I offered to pay for it.”

  “Oh, Sherilee,” Stella said, adding a couple of tasks to her ongoing to-do list: Deal with Todd—and then deal with Royal next. Maybe he needed to send his checks Certified Mail for a while. Stella was all for boys having their fathers in their lives—and she’d go so far as to say that an imperfect father was better than none at all—but a cooling-off period seemed like it might be in order. “Okay, look. I’ll talk to Royal, and the sheriff too, but it’s going to have to wait a day or so. In fact I need to keep ahold of Todd for a bit. That okay with you?”

  “Sure, you can keep him,” Sherilee said without hesitation. “Only where are you-all at?”

  “Well, see … we’re headed up to Wisconsin.”

  “Wisconsin!” Sherilee exclaimed, as though Stella had said Rome or the North Pole.

  “Yes. I have a little … business thing up here, shouldn’t take me too long. I’ll keep Todd in sight every minute, I’ll promise you that. That sound okay?” Stella wasn’t sure if she was making promises she could keep, but there would be time to worry about that later.

  “Oh my yes,” Sherilee said, sounding only marginally relieved. “That’ll give me a chance to work on Royal, see if I can get him calmed down some.”

  “Could you maybe look in on Roxy for me?”

  “Sure thing, the girls just love that dog. We’ll bring her over here until you get back.”

  “Thanks, Sherilee. I promise we’ll check in with you.”

  “All right. And Stella…”

  “Yeah?”

  There was a pause, and then Sherilee coughed delicately. “See he gets some sleep, will you? And eats something that ain’t all sugar? And … maybe give him a kiss when he ain’t lookin’?”

  Stella turned away from Todd so he couldn’t see her smile. “You got it, Sherilee.”

  She pocketed the phone and got her scowl back in place before turning back around. Todd followed her meekly to the truck and clambered into the passenger seat. They weren’t half a mile down the road before he was asleep, tucked against the door with his arms crossed across his chest, and Stella couldn’t help hoping his dreams were sweet ones.

  Chapter Six

  By the time they reached the outskirts of Smythe, Wisconsin, Stella was wishing she could pull over and sleep, too. However, the vague plan she’d cooked up over the course of the nearly five hundred miles she’d covered in BJ’s truck hinged on making her move while it was still the middle of the night—or, more precisely, 3:46 A.M., according to the clock on the dashboard.

  The way she figured it, her best source of information was bound to be Chip himself. She had the address that Gracellen had given her, a rented house that her sister had assured her was “right in the thick of things,” as though keeping close to the pulse of this eight-thousand-person town would make the place any more exciting for a young single man. Missing ear or no, there weren’t that many places a man could hide, Stella concluded as she drove down the shuttered streets, passing a single grocery store and half a dozen churches and a war memorial that rose a couple of stories tall in the moonlight.

  When the eerie, disembodied voice of BJ’s GPS assured Stella she was on the right track as she pulled a U-turn at a dead end and stopped in front of a very small cinder-block house wedged between a couple of aging wood-frame ranchers, Stella wrinkled her brow in consternation. She let the truck idle at the curb while she dug out her reading glasses and the ancient address book she’d had for several years. Stella was itching to get herself an iPhone so she could keep everything on it, but the little address book had been the last gift her mother had given her before she died, a little “just-because” gift because Pat Collier had spotted the sunflowers on the cover and, knowing her daughter loved sunflowers just about more than any other flower, had wrapped it up with a little bow and brought it over with a pan of homemade lemon bars.

  Maybe it was because it was nearly four in the morning and she’d been up all night. Maybe it was the stress of volunteering for what looked like yet another messy, potentially violent escapade in a year that had already featured several. Maybe it was the heightened responsibility of having a sprawling, lanky, ripe teen in the car, one who was unpredictable on the best of days and who was going to be in her care for the foreseeable future.

  Whatever the cause, when Stella squinted at the address book in the dome light of the borrowed truck, music playing faintly in the background so as not to disturb Todd’s slumber, she felt a pang of sadness that she hadn’t felt in a while. Not only missing her mother, who’d passed a number of years ago, but also missing having someone know the special things about her. Someone who remembered she loved sunflowers and lemon bars, who knew she had double-jointed toes and an astigmatism in both eyes and liked to nap in front of a fire on rainy days and read the comics first and sprinkle her grapefruit with sugar.

  “Now stop that, Stella,” she whispered to herself, wiping a tear away with the back of her hand and blinking several times. “You got more’n most folks.”

  That was true in spades. The older Stella got, the more she realized that a single good friend was a precious gift that lots of people coul
dn’t hang on to, whether it was from a lack of trying or bad luck or people dying out from under you—and she had several. While none of them might know everything about her the way her mama had, put them all together and they took darn good care of her. Chrissy sometimes knew Stella better than she knew herself, and she didn’t put up with any whining; the girl kept her on top of her game. Jelloman Nunn was the closest thing to a maternal figure Stella had, which was kind of funny since he was ten years older than her tops, and a man, not to mention one with a long gray ponytail and a beard down to his Adam’s apple and a thriving weed business—but he could be counted on to fuss over her and bake for her and set her up with a pile of blankets and a chick flick in front of the TV if she so much as got the sniffles.

  Then there was Dotty Edwards and Sherilee and Jane down at Hair Lines and Roseanne Lu and all her clients. Stella shook her head and clucked in impatience; she didn’t have any right to fuss. In the back of her mind was that other thought bubble, the one that occasionally bloomed into a full-fledged craving to have all those fine qualities rolled up into a single person, more specifically a male person who was reasonably attractive and equipped for an assortment of bedroom-type activities. Okay, okay, a boyfriend, not to put too fine a point on things. It was no kind of mystery why her little pity party had gone in that direction, since she was sitting here in a man’s truck, the very same man who’d only hours ago been working his big strong manly hand downward toward her tender nethers, one who’d been hinting for a while now that he might be available for a variety of leisure-time activities.

  Heck, Stella had both a problem and a ready-made solution. Only, why did it all have to come to the surface now, five hundred miles from home, when she had a job to do and—as usual—an imperfect set of resources to do it with?

  Stella opened the address book to the P page and ran her fingers down the list until it landed on “Papadakis.” Chess and Gracellen had the most robust entry, not only because they’d moved into the huge fancy tract home recently, but because Stella liked to keep a variety of facts on hand for gift shopping, like their sizes and colors and the fact that Chess was allergic to latex and rooted for the A’s and Raiders. For Chip, who she did not know nearly as well, fewer particulars were listed, but one of them was his address, and it took only a second to confirm that she was, indeed, parked in front of it.

  Which was a curious thing. It wasn’t that Stella couldn’t picture the young man in this humble little house despite his family’s considerable if recently diminished wealth—she knew how any kind of addiction, including the gambling sort, could send one’s quality of life plummeting.

  No, what caused her some consternation was the way he’d seen fit to decorate the place. Even in the not-optimal light cast by the streetlights and the truck’s aftermarket xenon headlights, Stella could make out clumps of faux flowers in the window boxes, bunches of plastic geraniums and roses and daisies with festoons of ivy trailing over the edges.

  It wasn’t the most manly decor Stella had ever seen, and it didn’t quite jive with Stella’s memory of the boy, who had been sullen and poorly groomed and not really giving off a whole lot of indication that he had a softer side that might show itself in outward displays of floral exuberance, even if she wasn’t one to judge about such things.

  She turned off the truck and put the back of her hand gently to Todd’s cheek, which was warm from sleep. She rested her hand there for a moment, feeling him breathe, a habit that went back to the night she brought Noelle home from the hospital, a mother’s need to confirm for herself that her children were well and thriving. Even if Todd wasn’t exactly hers, well, she’d given his mother a promise to care for him, and that meant “as if he were her very own.”

  Todd didn’t stir when she shut the door and trudged up to the house. She knocked gently, not wishing to wake the neighbors, and given how close-set the houses were and how flimsy the construction looked to be, that was a real concern.

  Inside she heard some shuffling and muttering and then a thump and some more urgent muttering and then silence. Someone was up, even at this hour, and from the sounds of it, there was more than one someone. Which might, come to think of it, explain the flower boxes, especially if the other someone was female—though for the life of her Stella didn’t recall Gracellen ever mentioning Chip having any romantic interests.

  She waited a while and knocked again, but when even a soft pounding failed to raise anyone to answer the door, she went back to the truck. As gently as she could, she opened the driver’s side door and rooted around the jump seat, collecting the Tupperware that contained her breaking-in tools. Not that she anticipated any trouble from Chip or any ladies he might be entertaining, but this had gone from a straightforward rousting from bed to a slightly more complicated scenario, and Stella made it a policy to meet complications appropriately armed.

  Todd had moved slightly, his arm now flung up over his head, his soft snores as gentle and sweet as a puppy’s growl, and Stella gave him a little pat before heading back to the house. She made quick work of the flimsy mortise lock on the door and pushed it open, finding herself in a dim living room that contained some mismatched furniture and a few silk flower arrangements and an overarching scent of potpourri with notes of cleaning products and something organic and unpleasant. Stella was trying to suppress both nausea and a sneeze when she heard rustling from the back of the house and found herself unable to announce her presence due to what felt like a sudden asphyxiation by Crystal Rain scent.

  When she followed the source of the sounds into the kitchen, Stella beheld a scenario that took a few minutes to comprehend, the various parts so at odds that they almost threw a switch in her tired brain. A man resembling Chip, except twenty pounds closer to a healthy weight and with a sheen to his feather-cut brown hair, was bent over the table holding a wicked-looking blade and a large meat fork. Whisking away draining fluids with a rag was a pretty dark-haired woman with a voluptuous build that was barely covered by a tank top and an apron, her extraordinarily pale shoulders and long legs visible underneath. And between the two of them, sliced and piled and trussed like a thanksgiving turkey, was what was left of a man—specifically, about three-quarters of the upper half.

  Chapter Seven

  “Oh!” the woman shrieked, taking a step back.

  “Good heavens,” Stella exclaimed, nausea surging with renewed vigor.

  “Aunt Stella? Is that you?” the young man who evidently actually was Chip asked, setting down his blade but holding on to the meat fork, which he’d been poised to poke into the exposed innards of the unfortunate torso on the table. The body’s head was resting on a folded dish towel, its mouth slightly ajar, its lids only half lowered, appearing to watch the procedures with something like bemused patience, as though he supposed he’d be a sport and put up with this unexpected interruption to his dismemberment and maybe even offer a beer from the fridge if only his hand was still attached.

  “What—how—”

  Stella discovered that she was pointing her little SIG at the strange tableau. She didn’t recall pulling it out of her purse, but even in her state of shock and disgust she had the wherewithal to be pleased that her reflexes were so finely tuned.

  Although it wasn’t clear what she would shoot, or what effect shooting might have.

  “Chip, what on earth are y’all up to?” she managed.

  “Oh, this looks bad, I know,” Chip said, “but I can explain. Here, watch you don’t slip, there’s … urr, stuff on the floor.” As though she were holding a sandwich rather than a gun, Chip grabbed a fresh rag and got down on his knees and set to mopping. “This here’s Natalya Markovic, by the way. My girlfriend.”

  “Hello,” the woman said in heavily accented English, bobbing her head up and down enthusiastically. “I am very pleased to meet.”

  On closer inspection Stella realized that there was something a little off about the woman. Her mouth and chin were swollen on one side, as though she’d been
hit with a baseball. Also, she was older than her initial impression. Fine lines bracketed her expressive brown eyes. She was still a real looker, though, possibly of the Eastern European variety, and she made Stella self-conscious of the fact that any makeup that had survived the mashing with BJ had long since melted into the wrinkles and under her eyes.

  “I’m Stella Hardesty. Um, what are you two doing cutting up this … this person?”

  “Oh, Chip is cutting, I am cleaning,” Natalya clarified. As if to illustrate the difference she seized a bottle of Crystal Rain Windex and gave the table an energetic spray. “I say we must be very clean.”

  “Natalya kind of has a thing about keeping things neat and sterile,” Chip said, straightening and tossing the rag in the sink, where a pile of rags was collecting. “If you knew her background you’d understand. Uh, I’d give you a hug but…”

  “That’s okay,” Stella said. She felt sort of silly with the gun in her hand, as it didn’t look like either one of them had any imminent plans to slice her up, too, so she slid it back in her purse. Then followed one of those awkward moments when she didn’t know exactly what to do with her hands; she clasped the purse handle in front of her and felt even more out of place, as though she were about to sing backup for a particularly realistic-looking stage show of a murder musical. “I’m, um. Sorry to bust in on you this way, but you didn’t answer the door.”

  “You made sure it shut after you, didn’t you?” Chip asked. “Maybe I better go check.”

  “We must stay very careful,” Natalya piped up. “There can be more trouble.”

  Stella found that her head was starting to swim with the oddity of the situation. “Who exactly are you worried about?” She pointed delicately at the remains of the gentleman on the table. “I mean, if you’re willing to do something like this, and I assume you figure this guy had it coming—”