Puerto Vallarta Squeeze

by Robert James Waller

  Three chickens walked by, pecking at whatever chickens find nobody else can see. The burro had moved up the street and stood there, looking back over its shoulder at them.

  The shooter let out a tired breath. “Let’s find a place to stay. Luz, you go in and check things out.”

  “I’d better go with her,” Danny said. “This place smells gringo to me, and they may refuse her.”

  “You mean a Mexican in a Mexican village would refuse a Mexican woman a room?”

  Danny couldn’t tell if he was being skeptical about the two of them going off by themselves or if he was genuinely incredulous.

  “Yeah, if they’re catering to tourists, they just might do that. To a lot of Anglos all Mexicans are wetback labor who just happen to be living south of the border instead of bending low in the vegetable farms of the San Joaquín. And the white folks ain’t sharing toilets with wetbacks if it comes to that.”

  “For chrissake… go do it.”

  The shooter was obviously tired and should have been and wasn’t making any attempt to hide it. In the last eight hours he’d kicked hell out of two hombres in a Teacapán beach joint plus carved three notches on his lifetime kill-total, and God only knew what that might be. Danny noticed the lines under his eyes were back again, deep and concentric and dark.

  A plump, pretty Mexican woman was tending bar. Otherthan her, the place was empty in the middle of May, offseason for the tourist trade. She told them they’d have to seethe head hombre and fetched him.

  He stood by the bar and looked them over, three days’ growth of beard and rolling a toothpick across his lower lip with a bad nick in it. Danny couldn’t tell if he was friendly or unfriendly or something in the middle. They asked to see a room, and he took them through the bar into a small courtyard serving as a dining area and up a narrow flight of stone steps. The steps led to a balcony overlooking the courtyard, with a row of rooms to their left along the balcony.

  The proprietor unlocked a door and swung it inward. A single overhead light hung from a cord, and the hombre flipped it on. The room was small, twin beds with serapes striped in Mexican colors draped across them and a wash basin on a stand. Plain, sparse, but clean and tidy, designed for low-budget gringo travelers. Ten dollars a night.

  Danny told him they needed two rooms, another person was waiting in the car. The second room was a reprise of the first, with a single window in the rear and opening onto a tile roof with the street only a short distance below where the tile ended. Danny was guessing the shooter would be interested in alternate exits from anyplace he stayed.

  They lugged their gear through the bar, across the interior courtyard, and up the stairs. On the way Danny asked the bartender about food. It was getting late, she’d have to check with the hombre again.

  The shooter looked around his place, then knocked on the door of Luz and Danny’s room. He said he was thirsty and told Danny and Luz he’d meet them down in the bar.

  In their room, Luz put her arms around Danny. He did the same to her, and they stood there for what seemed like a long time, holding each other, not saying anything. Each knew what the other was thinking: they were in one hell of a fix.

  “You okay, Luz?”

  “I am frightened, Danny. But I cannot decide about this man. He is nice to me and kind, but he kills without sorrow or thought. He is like something I’ve never imagined. Like some black horseman the old people used to talk about, an avenging spirit who comes riding only on the darkest nights and takes people away without warning. But I think I am more frightened because of our situation than I am of him. In some ways I feel secure because of what he can do.”

  “We’re in a tough spot, Luz. I don’t know quite how we’re going to get out of it. It’s a goddamned casserole. I’m sorry I got us into it.”

  “Danny, did you know about this man when we were still back in Puerto Vallarta?” She rolled her r’s smooth and pretty, something Danny had never been able to make his tongue execute.

  The side of her head was against his chest, “Yes, I saw him shoot those two men in the street. I was naive and stupid and arrogant enough to think I could pull this off, take him to the border and get a good story out of it. That’s why I didn’t want you to come along, but I couldn’t argue too strongly with you. I was afraid he’d find out I knew something. I should’ve booted your sweet little ass right back in the house and let you pout about it.”

  As he was saying that, he was running his hand over the sweet little part of her and finally left it there. She felt warm in the way only María de la Luz Santos could feel, and he wanted her right then, something to push back the day and all that had happened.

  But she pulled back a little and said, “He will be wondering what we are doing. We had better go down.”

  Luz took his hand, and they walked along the balcony, down the stairs, and through the courtyard lighted by blue and green bulbs strung diagonally across it. Of the ten bulbs, six were working. Of the six, a blue one was flickering.

  He stopped for a moment and looked at her. “Luz, doesn’t all this bother you, the killing, the violence? You seem pretty calm about it.”

  “There is a strength that comes from having been raised a peasant, Danny. ’You accept what is and what takes place as beyond your control, “fou work on getting through today and hoping tomorrow won’t be any worse. When I was a young girl and would complain about something or other, I remember my mother saying, ’Luz María, happiness is impractical.’ If he hadn’t killed those federates, we’d all be in prison now. But we’re not, and that’s good. Things could be worse.”

  The shooter was leaning back in a chair with his feet on another chair. He’d finished a Pacifico and was starting on a second one, squeezing a wedge of lime into it. Danny ordered the same for him and Luz and poured down a third of the bottle on his first pull at it. The woman tending bar went off to find the main hombre and ask about food.

  While Danny and Luz had been in their room, two gringos wearing dusty jeans and boots, snap-button shirts, and Stetsons had come in the cantina and were standing at the bar, drinking beer. One of the men kept looking back at the shooter, who pretended to be studying the walls but wasn’t.

  The cowboys finished their drinks and walked toward the door.

  The taller man stopped by the table, looked at the shooter, and spoke in a low Texas drawl, hoarse, as if loose stones were rattling around in his throat. “I know you? Seems I do, somehow.”

  The shooter raised his head and looked directly at the cowboy’s eyes. “Don’t think so; not that I recall, anyway.”

  “Thought I’d seen you before, somewhere, long time ago, ’Nam maybe.”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Sorry to bother you.”

  The cowboys went out on the porch, one of them talking in low, insistent tones to the other: “Jack, you’ve got to get your head straight. Linda’s been gone a long time, and she ain’t comin back. Sharon’s gone, Linda’s gone, they’re all gone, ’cause men like you and me are just too goddamn crazy to put up with.” One of the men coughed badly as they walked into the night and climbed into a pickup. The sound of the truck faded as they headed out of Zapata and up onto the Durango road.

  The shooter tilted his head toward the porch and said, “By what those two were saying, everybody’s going or gone.”

  He took a drink of his Pacifico, then held up the bottle and studied it. “It’s almost impossible to overstate the medicinal properties of beer.”

  Danny stared at him and wondered how he could sit upright, let alone drink beer. Christ, he looked tired, face sagging. The shooter took another hit of his Pacifico and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

  “That guy seemed pretty sure he knew you,” Danny said.

  “Remember him from ’Nam—First Cav or Seventh Marines, someplace—tough hombre, if I’m remembering right. Didn’t want to let on I recognized him, though.”

  There wasn’t much to lose now, no secrets anymore,
so Danny asked him straight out, “This what you call settling messy accounts, the whole business we’re involved in?”

  Clayton Price smiled a little. “That was Puerto Vallarta. The rest of it’s just getting by and getting home.”

  “How long you been at this?”

  The shooter finished his beer, went behind the bar, and got himself another, talking while he did it. “Since I was… let’s see, twenty-eight… after I got out of Vietnam and out of the marines.”

  He returned to the table, riding on that easy, long-legged walk of his, and sat down, looking hard at Danny, who had the distinct sensation an electric drill was headed for a point just above his nose, the Doppler effect of the shooter’s presence.

  The shooter didn’t say anything for a moment, straightened the bracelet on his right wrist, looked at it. Then: “It’s a trade you learn, like anything else. I picked up the basic skills in the military, long time ago. Some people make furniture, some do what I do. It’s all a question of learning a craft and using tools.”

  Clayton Price held the bottle of beer against his face. “I was a sniper, one of a handpicked group of men whose job it was to harass the enemy. Legalized terrorism, in other words. We were good at it, too. One guy had ninety-three confirmed kills. In one particular month he killed thirty people from long range, one-third as many as an entire battalion did operating in the same area. The VC called him White Feather, after a feather he wore in his bush hat.” The shooter shook his head in admiration. “I remember the time White Feather blew away one of Charlie’s ace snipers, put a round right down the other guy’s scope from a few hundred yards out. Damn, he was good, the best.”

  “How many did you have… kills?”

  “Eighty-two, confirmed, couple hundred probables. The VC put a price on my head at about number fifty. Three years’ pay to the man who got me.”

  “What’s a ’probable’?”

  “Meant there wasn’t any officer or NCO around to put their stamp of approval on it.”

  ’You killed eighty-two men in a war?” Luz almost whispered her words, shocked and disbelieving.

  Clayton Price lit a cigarette and nodded, looked at her seriouslike. “Closer to three hundred. One at a time, and not all of them were men.”

  “Women, too?” She was incredulous.

  He shrugged. “Sometimes children, if they were killing us in one way or another, and a lot of them did. They weren’t children in the way you think of children. Charlie made them into full-blown soldiers, running around with grenades and bombs under their shirts, You wouldn’t have heard too much about that, aside from the occasional massacre that made the news. Americans are so bloody innocent, or pretend to be; they wave flags and want war, but they want war with rules. There are no goddamned rules in the jungle. The Geneva Convention was a Stone Age document that had no relevance out there. Talk about contradictions—hollowpoint bullets and shotguns were banned by the so-called Law of Land Warfare, but it was apparently all right if the VC skinned people alive.

  “And some of the women were more brutal than you can imagine. One in particular was famous for cutting off the genitals of captured pilots within shouting distance of our compounds, then turning them loose. They’d run toward our perimeter wire, naked, with nothing left between their legs and blood spurting like a faucet from where their genitals had been. So much for the Geneva Convention and rules of war. We eventually got her. I shot her at seven hundred yards while she was squatting down taking a pee. Her head exploded like a cantaloupe. Technically, four hundred yards is the maximum range for a sure head shot, so I zeroed in on her chest, but she lowered herself a bit just as I squeezed the shot off. It was a tough, cruel game. No quarter asked, none given. Still is, for that matter… still tough and cruel.”

  Danny was silent for a moment, wondering about a woman’s head exploding like a cantaloupe, trying first to get the picture in his mind and, once he’d done it, trying to get rid of the image. “What does a sniper do? How did you work? My only image is one from old newsreels… Japanese with weeds sticking out of their helmets, perched in palm trees in the South Pacific.”

  “Different now, though the mission is similar—create fear, create ambiguity and indecision, make people afraid to step outside or poke their heads up.”

  Danny tried to see him in his bush hat, in the jungle, all those years ago, this man sitting across the table in a Mexican mountain village. He got the picture with no difficulty.

  The shooter paused, lit another cigarette. When the bartender came back, he signaled her he’d fetched a beer while she was out, making scribbling motions on his left palm to indicate she should put it on their tab. She got the message, then brought three plates of beans, rice, tomatoes, and cold chicken to the table. Luz started eating. Danny’s stomach was feeling a little dicey, listening to the shooter equate heads and cantaloupes, watching him dig a fork into refried beans.

  “So you just drifted out of the military and into becoming a…” Danny couldn’t quite say it.

  The shooter swallowed, smiled again, and filled in the blank. “A professional killer, you mean? An assassin, cloven hoofed and all the rest?”

  “Whatever you call it.”

  “Don’t be afraid of the word—it’s called killing. I’m a sniper. From the guy with a crossbow in the bushes who knocked off Richard the Lion-Hearted, to Leonardo da Vinci picking off enemy soldiers from the walls of Florence with a special rifle he designed, to Jim the Nailer out in India, in the siege of the Lucknow Residency, we’ve always been here. We’re what rises when things have gone too far, when law and politics have failed.

  “There’s a lot of gray areas out there; you can be out of the military but still working for them or some government somewhere. Civilians don’t like to believe that, but it’s true, You transcend into freelancing… people call you. Very little, almost none, of my work has been the kind of thing you saw in Puerto Vallarta. That was a special project. Mostly I’ve worked as a mercenary, a soldier-for-hire, wherever there’re bad guys.”

  “How do you define ’bad guys’?”

  “Anybody who’s not on my side.”

  Danny thought about that for a moment, then continued. “Where have you worked?”

  “All over. There’s always some nasty little war going on someplace. Or a remote drug lab in Colombia where the kingpin’s visiting and somebody wants him taken out, things like that. Africa’s been especially good over the years, and Latin America, the Middle East, too. I’m jungle trained, so I try to stay in those areas. Sniping is a specialty, that’s what they hire me for. Usually to take out some general or politician. As I said before, same thing all snipers do: create fear, indecision, ambiguity—lock the important creeps close to home, keep ’em from moving around. I was on a plane headed for Baghdad once, dressed up as some kind of ambassador’s assistant. Except I had a disassembled rifle and fifteen rounds of match-grade ammo in the diplomatic mail pouch. They called us back… don’t know why.”

  He looked at the table, massaged his fingers. “That one would have been interesting. Insertion is relatively easy; extraction is where it gets hairy.”

  “You do any job, no matter what it is?”

  “Most do, I don’t. I have my standards.” He stopped, grinned at Danny, then at Luz. “Sounds odd, doesn’t it, a professional killer with standards? I don’t get much work for the American government because I won’t do a job without knowing the reason for it. Usually they won’t tell you, but I won’t work blind and stand firm on it. Tell me the reason or call someone else. That’s why I like mercenary work, soldiering-for-hire… you generally have some idea of why the hell the war’s being fought, and you can decide to join up or not, depending how you feel about the issues at stake. And I don’t kill anything and call it sport, ever… animals included. Killing is not sport, it’s killing, period, and I happen to do it for a living.”

  “What kind of jobs would you turn down?”

  “Some rich guy wants his wife
out of the way so he doesn’t have to pay out big money when he divorces her. Or somebody’s just mad at somebody else or wants a business partner removed. Things like that. For a few hundred bucks,

  you can hire an eighteen-year-old ghetto kid to do that work. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making all of this seem honorable. Not trying to justify it. It’s what I do, that’s all, and I do it my way.”

  “What if somebody lied to you, about the reason for doing a job?”

  “They know better than that.” He took a drink of beer, and Danny believed his words.

  “I’m surprised you did the shooting in Puerto Vallarta from such a public place as El Niño.”

  “Ordinarily I wouldn’t. There’s no code of honor in this business about how the job gets done. Do it at long range if you can—as we used to say in ’Nam, long range is the next best thing to being there. Long range, and in the back if possible. But never in public, not if you can help it. I’d been looking for that guy for a couple of weeks and was running out of time. I was sure he was still in Puerto Vallarta, but he was lying up somewhere and I couldn’t find him. Suddenly he was there, getting out of a car right on the main drag. So, tying all of it together, it’s a matter of getting a little old and getting a little careless and sometimes not giving a damn anymore for some reason. Plus not having any other choice if the job was going to get done.

  “I think I’m slipping a bit. Also, there’s a lot of new high-tech weaponry out there I don’t have easy access to and don’t know how to use—night-vision glasses, sophisticated explosives. I’m pretty much a specialist, an old-time gunman, never have known much about explosives other than a few basic things. I’m starting to feel obsolete, like I’ve been flying close to the sun for a long time. Thinking now and then about closing down.”

  “The naval officer was a target, too?”

  “Uh… that was something else; let’s say he was a secondary target.”

  “Why were you sent to kill them?”

  Clayton Price had finished his supper, and the blue gray eyes with dark circles under them looked at Danny, then down at the Pacifico beer. Luz had gone off to the rest room and the bartender was sitting on the porch, out of earshot.