CHAPTER TWENTY

Everybody called them Gog and Magog. Those weren’t their real names, of course. Their birth certificates said Lon and Don Flanagan. The Flanagan boys were identical twins, now forty years old, six feet eight inches tall, and pushing three hundred pounds apiece, most of which was bone and gristle. They were pulpwood cutters, part of an extensive clan that had eked out a precarious existence for generations by feeding the paper mills of central East Texas.

Gog and Magog lived simple lives that consisted of work, hunting, sex with their rawboned wives, and what they called “frolic,” by which they meant the periodic near-destruction of the Roundup Club, a large country-and-western dance hall that sat just past the city limit out on Route 9 South. These annual events constituted a sort of demented fall harvest festival for the pair, and usually began near the end of a weeklong drinking binge. Or as Magog explained to me when I talked to him in the jail after the last such affair, “All we wanted to do was have a few more beers and listen to the music.”

Nelda Parsons’s father was the one responsible for their unorthodox nicknames. One night a decade and a half earlier, he chanced to be driving past the Roundup just as that year’s frolic burst out through the front doors and rolled onto the parking lot. Teeth, hair, and eyeballs were flying every which way, along with unlucky patrons and assorted lawmen, including a pair of rookie city cops who’d been foolish enough to answer the frantic call for assistance that had gone out over the police radio. Sweet and gentle man that he was, Reverend Parsons was so shocked by this unrestrained orgy of redneck violence that he later said that for a few horrifying moments he thought the tribulation had come to town, and that Armageddon was at hand.

This statement got wide currency and inspired some other Bible scholar to reach far back into the maelstrom of Old Testament prophecy and extract from the Book of Ezekiel the names Gog and Magog, those two evil nations destined to plague the righteous in the earth’s Latter Days. The twins were flattered and let it be known that they considered the nicknames the highest compliments ever paid them.

So it was not a joyful moment for me when Linda Willis hammered on my door a few minutes after seven that evening and interrupted my visit with Sheila to tell me that the Flanagan boys were firmly ensconced at the Roundup a full month before they were due to mount their annual assault on the public peace of Caddo County.

“Have they caused any trouble yet?”

“No, but everybody’s on edge. Otis stopped by there for a beer and said that the place feels like last year when we were under a tornado warning for two whole days.”

“By the way,” I said, “why are you still on duty?”

“I’m pulling a double. One of the evening guys called in sick, and I need the money.”

I didn’t like my deputies working double shifts, but with barely enough people on the force to cover all three shifts there was nothing I could do about it. “Let me get my boots on,” I said.

“I want to go too,” Sheila said. “It sounds interesting.”

“Why not,” I said, shaking my head in bemusement. “The more the merrier.”

“You drive,” I told Linda when we got to the Suburban. I opened the rear door for Sheila to climb into the backseat.

“What are you going to do?” Linda asked once we were on our way.

“I’m going to make them go home.”

“Can you do that? Legally, I mean?”

“Of course not, but I’m going to do it anyhow.”

“I’ve wondered why they always do what you tell them to do,” she said. “I mean, they’ll fight us deputies, and they’ll fight the city cops and the highway patrol, but they won’t give you any crap. Why’s that?”

“That’s one of those stories that’s too rough for your young and tender ears.”

“Damn it, Bo! I hate it when you say stuff like that. If I wasn’t driving this damn truck I’d kick you in the shins.”

“Settle down,” I said with a laugh. “When we get there you both just stay well back away from those two. And whatever happens, don’t shoot one of them. We don’t want to annoy them any more than we have to.”

*   *   *

Except for the jukebox wailing out a Garth Brooks song that nobody was paying any attention to, the Roundup was almost silent, and the whole place seemed to breathe a sigh of relief when I came in the door. I spotted the twins sitting at a table on the far side of the room, calm and placid and looking like a pair of well-fed bison in striped carpenter’s overalls. I walked right up to their table without hesitation. “A little early this year, aren’t you, boys?” I said.

“We ain’t looking for no frolic tonight, Sheriff,” Magog said.

“That’s right,” Gog said. “We come to town to see you.”

“Me?” I asked in surprise. The Flanagans weren’t the sort to take their problems to the law, and other than a few times over the years when I’d sent word that I needed to see them, they had never sought me out.

“That’s right,” Magog said. “We just thought since we were here in town we might as well have a few beers.”

“That’s right,” Gog said. “We got plenty of time ’cause he ain’t going nowhere.”

“Who’s not going anywhere?” I asked.

“That ole boy we found out by our place. Somebody done shot him full of holes and dumped him in the ditch. We heard you was investigating murders this week, and we figured you might want another one.”

*   *   *

The Flanagan family was spread all over central East Texas, but the Caddo County branch lived in a cluster of surprisingly neat trailer houses far out in the woods on the upper edge of the Angelina River floodplain in the western part of the county. In wet weather you need a good pickup with mud-grip tires to get there, and a four-wheel-drive vehicle is an even better bet. But the drought made it a snap in the department’s Suburban.

We followed the twins’ 4X4 Dodge pickup. The route led off the main highway onto a graded county road, and then after a couple of miles onto a narrow logging road that was really nothing more than a pair of ruts that wound their way between two tall dark walls of forest. About a hundred yards short of the last curve that marked the clearing where the Flanagans lived, the Dodge stopped and both men stepped out.

The body was lying faceup in the ditch with four bullet holes in its chest, and it was already beginning to swell a little with the heat. I called out the DPS forensics people once again. Bob Thornton, the local Texas Ranger who covered three counties, showed up right behind them. I was there half the night. We set up floodlights and combed the area and found nothing. We interviewed Gog and Magog and their wives and children to determine if anyone had heard or seen anything. No one had. I called one of my day-shift deputies to work early and detailed him to follow the ambulance and observe the autopsy. I knew that when it was over I’d have a handful of bullets, and my instincts told me they would match the ones that had killed Amanda Twiller. Which gave me two murder victims and little else. I felt sure that both killings were somehow linked to Sipes and the cocaine trade, but I had no idea how. Nor did I have any idea who’d actually pulled the trigger. And at that point I wasn’t too optimistic about ever finding out. The most recent victim, of course, was Doyle Raynes.