Go get ’em, Dude!

      Chapter One

      “How the hell did your bull end up in my mud bog?” Logan Taylor asked his best friend and neighbor, Fletcher McFadden. Fletcher had called Logan a half hour ago requesting help. Luckily Logan had his cell phone with him in the barn where he’d been mucking out stalls.

      “Danny left the gate open again.” Danny was Fletcher’s seven-year-old son. The kid was a handful.

      Logan didn’t comment on the boy’s carelessness. Danny was going through a rough patch after Fletcher and the boy’s mother divorced. Come to think about it, all three of them—Danny, Fletcher and himself—had seen better days. “I brought a sling,” Logan said. He’d also loaded a few hay bales into the truck bed. He’d spread the hay around the edge of the bog to help the bull gain its footing after the animal was freed. He motioned to Fletcher who stood knee-deep in muck. “What do you plan to do—push the bull end over end until he rolls out of there?”

      “Ha, ha. Hurry up, hoss. My feet are numb.”

      Logan tossed two ends of the sling through the air. A warm spell had ushered in the first week of December, but a chill hung in the early-morning air and white clouds puffed from Fletcher’s mouth as he struggled to work the harness beneath the ten inches of space between the bull’s belly and the mud.

      “You ever think about fixing this bog?” Fletcher grunted.

      Granted, Logan should have filled the mud hole long ago. The problem was he didn’t give a crap about much anymore. After Bethany died everything had lost its urgency. He was marking time. Waiting for something to change his life. Waiting for…just waiting.

      Although Fletcher had his share of troubles recovering from a divorce and raising a son, he’d tried to drag Logan back into the world of the living after Bethany’s death. Logan appreciated his friend’s concern but preferred a solitary existence.

      “All set.” Fletcher flung the ends of the harness over the bull’s body and Logan secured them to the trailer hitch on his truck.

      “I can’t lose this bull to a broken leg,” Fletcher warned.

      The McFaddens raised some of the best breeding bulls in Texas. “How much is he worth?” Logan asked.

      “So much he ain’t for sale.”

      Logan removed a pair of wire cutters from his pocket and opened the bales in the truck bed. After tossing the hay along the edge of the bog he hopped in his truck.

      “Nice and easy!” Fletcher hollered.

      Nice and easy was the only way to pull a two-thousand-pound hunk of beef from a muddy hole. Logan pressed the accelerator and the truck’s tires dug into the earth. He checked his side mirror. Fletcher had his shoulder jammed against the bull’s side, trying to coax it to move its legs.

      The animal slowly toppled onto its side. With steady pressure on the gas pedal, Logan moved the truck a few feet forward. For a second the bull sank beneath the mud, only the whites of its eyes visible. Logan gave the truck a little more gas and the animal’s head emerged.

      “Keep going,” Fletcher said. “He’s almost to the edge.”

      The diesel truck engine groaned in protest, but finally the bull reached solid