Chapter 1

Officer C. Olson was, by all accounts, a son of a bitch. His mother, to all who knew her, was literally a bitch. She was one of the surliest and most unkind bitches that ever walked the earth. His childhood was rife with trigger points that inexorably led him down a path that could end in one of two ways: criminal, or cop. But it wasn't just his lineage that endowed him with his moniker, he was as much the epitome of the policeman you never want to get pulled over by as any man could ever be.

He stood six feet, three and a half inches tall. He had a wide build that, once imposing and menacing even as a silhouette, had made it a point to soften annually. Perched deep inside two cavernous eye sockets were steel-grey eyes; eyes that, nearly three decades before, had sent fear into the bloody and beating hearts of every wide receiver and tailback he ever set sight on. The eyes that once glowed with a white-hot fire had cooled, striking now only in the uniformity of the color of his irises. He wore a mustache, partially because that's what cops do, but also because he knew it was the one thing he could still do to piss off his wife. His nose was thick, like a tree branch, extending up into his forehead, ending in a thicket of persistently untamed black hair. It was also slightly crooked, just above the middle, from his one attempt at a life of crime.

He was nineteen when he lost everything. Some fucking faggot from Waycross High School landed a tackle after a down. Sure the referee called a flag on the play for unsportsmanlike conduct. Sure the faggot never went on to become anything important. But neither did Olson. The way the little shit had landed on Olson's leg literally snapped his femur like a twig, a fact that to this day held the Waycross County Hospital's unofficial title of "Most Crazy Broken Bone." They even kept the x-ray on the wall of the waiting room for the ER, the backwards, redneck fucks. After just over a year of physical therapy, Olson was walking around again, mobile, and even able to jog at a decent pace for a few minutes, though nothing sustainable yet. Either way, his hopes of playing football in college, and thus his hopes of going to college at all, were dashed. After graduation, a lot of kids from his high school stuck around town. Rural Tennessee is not known for producing fine academic minds, with a few gracious exceptions. There wasn't a lot to do in Stapleton; a few bars, a grocery store and a movie theatre were the main attractions. If you didn't leave as soon as you could, the town had a way of sucking you in, holding you down until in your last breath you lamented over a wasted life and passed on into the void. Olson had resigned himself to this fate.

Tim Voyt, who insisted well into his fifties that he be called "Timmy" was the first to experiment with the nefarious side of life in Stapleton. That is to say, as nefarious as a town like Stapelton allowed one to be. Timmy and a few other recently graduated boys had hatched a half-witted plan to rob the cash drawer at The Hinge, one of three bars in Stapelton. It didn't occur to Timmy, Olson or any of the other boys that once they had emptied out the cash drawer they'd just turn around and spend the money on booze at The Hinge or some other bar the next night. Planning wasn't their strong suit. What they didn't expect, in all their scheming, was that the bar's owner and a few of the regulars would still be inside, drinking after hours. When Olson kicked in the back door he was surprised to hear hurried footsteps coming through the service door and even more surprised to feel the swift blow of a crowbar cracking across his face. The other boys ran that first forty yards faster than any they had ever put down on the football field, leaving Olson writhing, red hot with pain on the floor of the tiny kitchen of The Hinge.

The bar's owner threw Olson's hulking frame into the cab of his truck and drove Olson home, where he pushed him out the door and left him to bleed in the yard. After what seemed like weeks, Olson noticed movement on the porch. A cat jumping back and forth across the light coming from the screen door? No. A rocking chair. If his sense of smell wasn't fully occupied with the task of smelling his own blood he would've caught the scent of tobacco in the air, and would've detected the growing stench of alcohol and sweat coming towards him at a steady, if stilted, pace. If he hadn't been so preoccupied with the bleeding, the wretched pain and the flap of his ear lobe dangling from a thread of brutalized flesh, he would've felt the first kick land in his stomach. At this point pain was pain, it all melted together and Olson was the fire at the center of his own hot, painful little world.

Olson's dad had given him the beating of a lifetime, a fact that he carried with him for years as a police officer. Olson spent the next day inside the house, dressing his wounds as best as he knew how while his mother shouted at him for hours on end through the locked bathroom door. He wished he had brought a magazine in with him, at the rate she was going he'd be in here for hours with nothing to do but listen to her berate him. The injury, the attempted robbery, the beating of a lifetime, and still the worst year of Olson's life wasn't done with him yet. The next day he went to see Lenora, the only one who had actually been by his side during the painful physical therapy after his injury.

Lenora Merritt was the daughter of the pastor of Stapleton's one and only church, Stapleton Baptist, and was as much a preacher's daughter as Olson was a member of the royal family of England. Still, her reputation for being...gregarious...didn't matter to Olson. To him she was everything. They had started dating while in their senior year of high school and the way she looked at him; it was like he had saved the world. She even started paying attention to her father's sermons, a stark contrast from her noticeably obligatory attendance in the past.

After his injury, Lenora had been Olson's rock. She was the reason he recovered at all. He didn't have much of a spirit to go on, but Lenora prodded and persisted, telling Olson he'd get better. He could still play football. He hadn't told her what the doctors told him at the end of his physical therapy, that he would never play again. He was afraid that she would abandon him, as he had nearly done to himself.

Back in the upstairs bathroom at his house, he was satisfied that he had dressed his wounds as best he could, and none too happy with the damage the crowbar had done to his nose, Olson decided to go see Lenora; hopefully she would make him feel better despite the earlobe that was held to his ear with a band-aid.