White Bizango

by Stephen Gallagher

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Horror; Noir

Synopsis

Rescued from the morgue and a bizarre and unpleasant end, Louisiana detective John Lafcadio owes his life to the Cult Crime Co-ordinators. Known also as the Voodoo Cops, their job is to dispel superstition and nail crimes of ignorance. There's a growing need for their services. A new kind of predator is on the loose. When the middle classes began to adopt vodoun as a lifestyle fad, their doors were opened to a ruthless white male with a command of the religion's darker practical secrets. Hunting down Lafcadio's would-be killer will be no easy task. His victims are also his protectors. And how can Lafcadio hope to identify a man whose eyes he once stared into, but whose face he can't remember?

Release date: April 30, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 208

Sample

JOE R LANSDALE

FIRST BOOK I read by Stephen Gallagher was Valley of Lights. Blew me away. I knew that the writer was British writing about the US, but that feeling didn’t last long. I was soon absorbed in the story.

I wasn’t the only one blown away by Valley of Lights. In fact, that novel gave Gallagher his name here in the States, made him a writer of prominence. I know I was impressed, and was more than a little proud to share a Night Visions anthology with him some years later.

I think I wrote better material because I knew Stephen Gallagher was going to be in the anthology with me, and I didn’t want to look like a goober beside him, though I may have anyway.

A goober standing beside Stephen Gallagher may not be an image you want in your head, so we’ll just let that one lie and move on.

One thing I especially liked about Valley of Lights, and for that matter everything I’ve read since by Gallagher, is his style. He writes with a rhythm.

My guess is he can’t actually write a story or novel until he feels this rhythm in his head. Which is not to suggest he’s dancing around his work room to the inner drums and rhythm guitars inside his skull, though that’s highly possible, but his work has that kind of beat and boogie that only writers of character and style have. He plots well. But his strength is in the purity of his storytelling and in the development of his characters, and these are out-growths of, well, The Storyteller’s Boogie, and only a true story teller can do it. It’s a kind of mental mating dance by which the writer seduces the reader and they can still feel good about themselves in the morning.

Stephen Gallagher can also take a pretty regular idea and just plain old beat the tar out of it, remold it, and make it something unusual, totally unexpected, and riveting.

Which brings us to the novel at hand.

First off, White Bizango is written in the first person. My favourite form of storytelling. It has an immediacy, as well as an intimacy, that I enjoy. When I was a kid I read a novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, (A Princess of Mars) written in first person, and it was so convincing that somewhere, deep inside of me, I truly believed the story, and from that time on I have preferred this approach.

Burroughs was a master storyteller, but not a master stylist.

As I have already pointed out, Stephen Gallagher is both. This book is so easy to read, so riveting, that you are briskly pulled into the story. I have to say it again. Man, this book is easy to read, and it’s wonderful. Its seemingly simple approach belies its true complexity.

Here Gallagher has captured the taste and feel of Louisiana in a style that can only be called American, and he has also written the best book of his career. It’s short and swift. A small package. But as they say, dynamite comes in small packages.

Here’s a box of it now.

Did I say this is the best novel of his career?

Okay. I might have missed one of his novels, maybe two, but this one made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

White Bizango’s mood wraps around you like a warm blanket. Gave me the kind of sensation I used to have as a kid, watching some monster movie late at night, rainy and windy outside, sitting on the couch, or in front of it, tenting a blanket over me, feeling wonderfully and pleasantly terrified.

How to describe it further without giving away its prizes?

Fast paced?

Oh, yeah. That’s good.

Rich and evocative of location?

That works, big time.

Pumping with the rich warm blood of a true storyteller?

Said that already, but it bears repeating.

Got that voodoo-hoodoo going?

You betcha. Classic voodoo stuff. But kicked in the ass by Gallagher to give it a feel reminiscent of voodoo stories and films you may have encountered, but, somehow … different.

But is it creepy?

Yeah. Creepy, folks. Real damn creepy. Old style creepy. A kind of creepy you don’t get much anymore in books or films. And, I think I should point out, this would make a great film. A real chilly-billy of a deal. Best read late at night, when the day’s concerns are past, but just before you get too tired, and if you are tired, you won’t be long. This dude will hook you and drag you along and keep you awake better than a shot of caffeine.

What else?

Oh, I know. The most important thing of all.

It’s as readable as they come.

So, let’s cut to the chase.

Quit screwing around. I’m just getting in the way, gushing all over the place. So quit listening to me.

I’ll shut up now. And if I don’t, push me aside.

It’s time to start reading.

Joe R LansdaleJuly 2002

NOBODY SHOPS on Row Street any more. For that we have the Iberville Mall, out between the town and the lake. It’s our civic showpiece. They built it on land where the battery works used to be.

Amy had taken the car, so I was driving the Jeep. In the Detective Division we use our own vehicles and claim mileage. Missing child reports don’t often get passed to us from the mall; in most cases their own security people resolve the situation. Usually it’s just a matter of the child going astray, or hiding from its parents out of mischief or pique.

But unless he’d been found since I took the call, this child had been gone for almost an hour. That made it more serious. As I came in on the perimeter road, I couldn’t see anyone searching the parking lot; they should have been securing it by now, but all I could see were a couple of our cruisers by the main entrance and a small crowd outside.

I turned in at the first opening and cut across the empty asphalt. They were supposed to have cleaned up the ground before they laid it, although I’ve been told there are cracks that leak a kind of orange goo when the water table rises.

Iberville, West Louisiana. Some parts of it aren’t too pretty, but it’s home.

I parked and went over. To the officer on the doors I said, “Did the boy turn up yet?”

“They’re looking at tape in the store,” he said, and told me where to aim for.

It had the usual interior arrangement—one of everything, a food court, multiple sportswear shops and a Sunglasses Hut. One end of the complex was dominated by an upmarket department store where people went to look at the expensive brands before buying copies elsewhere. The store had entrances on both levels, and it aspired to class. It was the smart place to register your wedding list and its coffee shop was the choice of the ladies who lunch.

The mall would have been quiet at this hour anyway, but thanks to the security operation it was almost deserted. Some of the salespeople had emerged from their units and were chatting in the concourse, arms folded, eyes wary, ready to head back to their posts at the first sign of a return to commerce.

The department store had no doors, just a wide walk-in entrance. From the greeter I got directions to the customer service desk on the upper floor, where a woman was waiting. Someone had brought her a chair, but she was standing. They’d assigned a young sales associate to look after her and I think she’d been looking for someone bigger to get her teeth into.

Well, I suppose that’s unfair. But when she sensed my approach and turned to face me, the look in her eyes was one of readiness to attack. I thought about how I’d feel if I was in the same position over one of my daughters. We’d lost one of them for a few minutes in a branch of The Gap, once. Aged five, she’d sidestepped into the middle of a rack of jeans and stayed there to enjoy our panic.

“My name’s John Lafcadio,” I said. “I’m a detective. Are you Mrs Boudreaux?”

She got straight to it.

“My son’s been kidnapped,” she said.

“I understand he’s missing,” I said, “but what makes you think he’s been taken?”

“I’m certain of it,” she said. “He knows the dangers. He wouldn’t walk away.”

I looked around for someone in authority; but there was only the sales associate, a short-haired, brown-eyed girl who looked like an eager child in a grownup’s uniform. I said to the woman, “I need to ask you a couple of things. Do you live with your son’s father?”

“Of course I do.” Then she checked herself, as if there was something she’d forgotten for a moment. “Well, it’s more complicated than that.”

“Meaning what?”

“We’re not separated, but he’s hospitalized. Kenny is not the man who took my son. There are no custody issues here, Detective Lafcadio. Please don’t waste your energy in that direction.”

“Nine times out of ten we find the child and they’ve just wandered off and got themselves lost.”

“And one time in ten you find what?”

For which I didn’t have a ready answer.

She was in her early thirties (thirty-two, I later learned), with cold blue eyes and blonde hair in a precise, expensive cut. If it was a dye job, it was one of the best I’ve ever seen. A tad skinnier than was good for her, making her shoulders look bony and square but giving her the kind of dress-up-doll figure that gay couturiers love.

I said, “Have you received any kind of a threat that leads you to think someone’s taken your son, Mrs Boudreaux?”

She spoke across me. “Someone was talking about closing down the mall and letting nobody out. Has that been done yet?”

“We’ve got people watching all the exits.”

“That won’t stop him!”

“Stop who, Mrs Boudreaux?”

She checked herself, and took a moment to choose her words.

“Whoever it was that took Christopher,” she said.

So there was some kind of a backstory that she was determined not to give me. It would have to be drawn from her eventually, but there were a few more immediate things that I needed to do. I asked the associate about their security tapes, and she told me how to find the office where they kept the machines. She said that the manager was checking them now.

Julie Boudreaux said, “I want to see the tapes.”

“I need you to hold on here a while longer,” I said. “I’ll send for you if there’s anything to see.”

She still wanted to go with me, but I managed to get her to stay on the sales floor while I went off to talk to the store manager.

“WE JUST found it,” the manager’s deputy said. She was a young woman with dark red hair in gel spikes, and eyes that gave you the feeling they rarely saw daylight.

“How does it look?” I said.

And the manager himself said, “Not good.”

They rewound the tape and played it back for me.

We were in a windowless office suite, backstage behind the crystal ware section. The two of them were reviewing the morning’s images on an cheap-looking portable TV set with a built-in video slot under the screen, the kind you usually see out on the sales floor running infomercials about kitchen appliances.

The associate must have called ahead, because they’d been expecting me when I arrived.

The screen was divided into four. Their surveillance wasn’t state-of-the-art, but one of those systems taking single frames every second or so. There’s no sound and the quality’s not great, but you can get several days’ worth of sampled activity onto the one tape.

The deputy pointed to the top left-hand quadrant of the screen. The timecode showed today’s date and a time of 10.03.

There they were. A boy and his mother. The boy was fair-haired and aged around nine or ten, but you couldn’t say much more about him than that. His mother was on the edge of the screen and in two frames had left it completely, so the boy was on his own.

Suddenly a man was there with him.

You didn’t see him walk in, he just appeared. This was like a drama where the story was all in the missed moments and you had to fill in the gaps for yourself. Three still frames of conversation and then they were walking out together, in the opposite direction from the woman. At no time did the man face the camera. In one shot, his hand was on the boy’s shoulder.

They knew each other. Had to. Nothing else made sense.

I said, “How long before the mother raised the alarm?”

“Seconds,” the manager said. “See for yourself.”

There she was, onscreen again, looking for her son in the aisle where she’d seen him last. Now she was spinning in panic, now she was flying out in a blur. I glanced at the other angles on the screen and in one of them I thought I saw what might have been the man and boy crossing a different part of the floor together, but I don’t know. At that resolution it could have been anyone.

I said, “And how long before you started your missing child protocol?”

“Just as long as it took us to get a description from her,” the manager said. “Three, four minutes. No more.”

His deputy said, “The way she acted, it was almost like she’d been expecting it to happen.”

“That’s not an appropriate speculation,” her employer said sharply. “Keep it to yourself, please, Jill.”

“Sorry.”

I said, “I’m going to call my boss and tell him we need a team out here. Where’s Mall Security based?”

Spike-haired Jill, slightly chastened by her reprimand, was assigned to take me there.

This meant leaving the store, crossing the hall by the fountain and the central bank of escalators, and waiting to be buzzed through into another behind-the-scenes stairway down at the far end of a rest room corridor. She was subdued. . .