Puerto Vallarta Squeeze

by Robert James Waller

  “I have some things to tell you. “You think it’s been rough so far? It could get a lot rougher before this is over, so it seems like you ought to know the whole story. Not sure why, just seems that way.” He looked off in the direction Luz had gone. “For her sake, maybe.”

  Danny took a drink of his beer and said nothing.

  “The civilian I killed in Puerto Vallarta was preparing to sell computer secrets to a Taiwanese industrial consortium, something to do with something called failure analysis, some kind of sophisticated computer simulation of why things go wrong. The military is very interested in this technology. American business firms are hot on it, too. It’s one of the next technological frontiers, and one of the few areas where Americans are ahead of the pack. When one of the big defense firms got its budget whacked in the current wave of military cutbacks, a number of high-ranking engineers were laid off. One of them was the civilian in Puerto Vallarta. He’d decided to pick up a tip on his way out and was selling what he knew about failure analysis to this Taiwanese group. His payoff was in the big millions, that was the rumor.

  “The hit was contracted for by a branch of the U.S. government, not sure which one. There was a go-between, of course… there always is, but it smelled government right from the start, and I confirmed that before I signed on. I wasn’t the only one hired, there were two or three other freelancers, that’s how bad they wanted him. At least one other contractor was in Puerto Vallarta, saw him sitting in a bar one night. Knew he was a shooter. There’s an old Russian proverb, ’A fisherman sees another fisherman from afar.’ All of us were given carte blanche, go where we had to go, do what we had to do. We each were guaranteed a flat amount of money plus a bonus for the man who got the job done—bounty hunters.

  “I was told the transfer of information might take place in Mexico, and I tracked this engineer to Puerto Vallarta. Couldn’t find him once I got there. I knew he was going to meet someone soon, but I didn’t know where or when. I was just sitting in El Niño one night, and there he was.”

  “But you had your gun under your vest on the windowsill. “fou must have had some idea he was going to show up.”

  “You stay ready. Strange things happen. Luck sometimes plays a part in it, in spite of what I said about luck the other night.”

  “What about the naval officer you shot?”

  The shooter smiled in a sad way and scratched his right cheek. “Not sure why I’m telling you all this. Sometimes I don’t seem to care much about anything anymore, I guess.”

  He sighed and stared up at the ceiling. “It gets pretty bizarre, about here. When I was in Southeast Asia, we were sent on a hush-hush mission to kill a Dutchman who had a plantation in Cambodia and apparently friends in high places. He was letting the Viet Cong use his plantation for a storage dump, and, believe it or not, he was an expert in torture. ’Don’t get captured in that sector or the Dutchman will go to work on you and you’ll wish you’d never been born while you’re praying for death,’ that was the word.

  “Three of us went. A captain who was my commanding officer, my spotter, and me. We were rousted out of bed in the middle of the night, told to gather our equipment and go down to the helicopter landing area. Fifteen minutes later we were on our way.…” The shooter paused and smiled. “That cowboy that was just in here… he was a gunner on the chopper that took us out on the mission, but he didn’t come back with the dust-off crew. Snipers are taught to be good observers, see everything and never forget it. Took me a few minutes, though, to realize where I’d seen him before. Damn, over twenty-five years ago and here he is drinking beer in little ol’ Zapata… can you imagine that, right here in Zapata.”

  He shook his head and sat quiet for a moment, then went on. “Anyway, none of us had any idea of what was up on that particular mission; all I knew is that we were being sent to kill a special person somewhere. Even the captain didn’t know. He was given a small piece of a larger map, covering only about five square miles, the area in which we d be working. Found out later we were in Cambodia. When I asked the captain that night what the hell we were up to, he said, ’Same as always, peelin tails and suckin heads.’ He was from the bayou country and liked to use that crawfish metaphor.”

  Danny was still dawdling with his supper but shoved the plate away when the shooter started quoting bayou philosophers.

  “It was a precision operation, no room for error. We set up our ’hide’ and waited, all three of us hunkered down there for almost four hours. Intelligence had somehow gotten word the Dutchman would be coming along a certain trail on his way to meet with the VC, did it every morning, apparently. Sure enough, he came out of the jungle two hours after dawn. Pith helmet, khakis, walking stick, the whole business. It was a relatively easy shot. I put a hollow-point in his throat at four hundred fifty yards, which probably did the job since his head fell over to one side and was barely hanging there by a few pieces of skin, at least it looked that way to me through the scope. But, by God, he got to his feet somehow and started running around all over the place, head flopping on his shoulder and blood spraying out of the wound. None of us had ever seen anything like it before, like a chicken after you’ve cut off its head. The captain said, ’Hit ’im again.’ So I put another round dead between his shoulder blades… that took him down for good.

  “Next thing we know, a mortar burst hits twenty yards from us. As careful as we’d been, someone had spotted our position. We took off running like hell down a gulch, then climbed a hill at least two hundred yards high. The deal was, the captain had called in a chopper that was to be at point X to pick us up in twenty minutes. Christ, there was suddenly VC all around us.”

  Danny watched the shooter’s eyes widen at the remembrance of terror, of true and absolute fear and flight.

  “Automatic weapons fire, mortars, all hell breaking loose. My spotter got cut right in two from a burst; I mean, there was nothing left of him, entrails slopping out, a mess. The captain and I kept running, scared as hell. We came over the top of the hill and ran down the other side, our clothes being ripped by thorns and God knows what else. My shirt was in rags. We came to this meadow, still running, but the VC cut us off. So we detoured across an open rice field, running along the dikes. We were damn near gone, stumbling, fighting to get air in our lungs.

  “We could see the chopper coming in to pick us up about a half mile ahead. The pilot saw us running through the paddies and changed his landing zone, found a place, and set it down. The captain took a round when we were still two hundred yards away from the chopper sitting there with its blades turning. I got him up on me, piggyback style, and started off again. The VC were closing in from three sides, but I could see we were going to make it if the pilot would just wait. I’m knee deep in water and mud, the extra weight of the captain pushing me down, taking it one step at a time, churning, big sucking noises every time I lift a foot and take a step. There’s a guy crouched in the chopper’s passenger bay, door open. When we’re only thirty yards out and the VC closing in, he panics, waves the pilot off, and the chopper leaves. I’ve always remembered his face looking down at me as they lifted off; it’s been carved into my mind for all these years… his face. The sonuvabitching coward just left us there.

  “Anyway, I’d been fishing around Puerto Vallarta for almost four days and nothing to show for it. I’m sitting there looking out the window of El Niño on a pleasant evening and who should come strolling down the street in his nice white uniform but the guy who left me standing there in a Cambodian rice paddy with a U.S. Marine captain riding on my back. I’m telling you true, it was him. Older, but it was him. I was just about ready to follow him, figured I’d violate all my principles and do some personal work, take him down on a side street, when this green sedan stops and my real target gets out.

  “This is all happening in the space of seconds, understand, so I had some quick choices to make. I went for the whole bundle, both of ’em. Outside the window in El Niño there’s a pole with a guywire
attached to it. My effective field of fire was only about four feet between the wire and the pole. It was tricky, particularly with a handgun, but not that tricky. Since the navy man was walking and would have been out of my sight in a second, I pulled down on him first, went for a chest shot, but I was a little high and hit him in the neck, I think. I was using magnum hollow-points, though, so it probably worked out if medical attention was slow in coming. It shouldn’t have taken two shots on the civilian. Like I said before, feeling a little slippage in my skills, or my attitude, maybe both.

  “As I see it now, shooting the navy man was a mistake, at least in the time and place I picked. The basic rule in this business is never let your own personal feelings get tangled up with your work and never do a hit for personal reasons, period. That’s how you get in trouble, you can be connected in some way to the hit. You probably don’t know this, but most professional killers are never even suspected of having done a job, let alone caught. The idea is to remain unobtrusive, and I broke that rule in Puerto Vallarta. Lost control because of something personal that happened years ago. It’s in my file somewhere… well known I’d sworn to kill that navy bastard if I ever found him. I was warned, about ten years ago, not to even think about it, that he was in some special branch of the navy hooked up with the CIA… something important and undeniably mean.”

  “What happened after the helicopter took off and left you standing there in a Cambodian rice paddy?”

  “You don’t want to know in any detail or you’ll never be able to eat again. The captain and I were tortured.” The shooter held out his hands, and Danny saw deep scars around the fingernails he hadn’t noticed before. He pointed to the missing finger on his left hand. “They sawed this off with a rusty jungle knife, just as a warm-up for the really bad stuff. The captain died from what they did to us. I killed a guard, garroted him with a piece of wire one night, and escaped. Came to a river and floated down it on logs until I came to the sea. Worked my way southeast along the Gulf of Thailand, living off the land and friendly villagers until I ran into an army patrol three weeks later. I tell you, I looked all over ’Nam for that bastard who left me standing in the rice paddy with the captain slung over my back, but he’d apparently been rotated out and was gone.”

  Luz came back just as the shooter was finishing his story. Later on Danny would tell her all of what the shooter had said. “I don’t quite know how to say this, but how do you live with it… with the things you’ve been talking about?” ’”fou mean how do I live with the killing?” “Yeah, that, You’re five and oh in the last few days.” Clayton Price smiled. “First off, after ’Nam I stopped keeping score; just do the work now, and there’s no such thing as a losing record in this business, anyway. Beyond that, depends on how you see morality or whatever it’s called. Westerners, Americans in particular, are a bunch of hypocrites when it comes to killing. Other day I read about seventeen babies being born with empty brain cavities up in the Brownsville hospital, supposedly due to industrial pollution. The article talked about all kinds of sewage and toxic waste running down the gutters, clouds of shit drifting over the workers’ shacks. Most of it coming from American factories located over there to avoid U.S. environmental laws and wage levels.

  “In my mind, there’s no qualitative difference between those business executives and me. Well, maybe one—my killing’s surgical, theirs is indiscriminate. Hell, it just goes on and on, all over the place. If it isn’t a gun, it’s pollution. If it isn’t either of those or cars with exploding gas tanks or about a million other things, gravity eventually takes us all down. Think about the American Indians, how we wiped ’em out. Then think about trumped-up wars in far-off places. When I get down real tight on it, see it straight and clean, I know I killed two or three hundred people in Southeast Asia for no other reason than to satisfy the egos of politicians and generals. I was a mercenary there, too, only I was too young to realize it. One way or the other, economics or religion lies at the bottom of it.

  “Savings-and-loan executives running off with money and driving old people to despair and emotional wreckage. Young Eskimos machine-gunning walruses so tusks can be swapped for drugs. The Crusades, the IRA, the lynching of blacks, the Holocaust, the Conquistadors—we’re all in the killing business, one way or the other, You probably buy products made in those Matamoros factories, making you an accessory, and claims of not knowing it’s going on don’t wash, ’cause you know it’s going on.

  “Look, I’m tired and ranting a bit. I came to terms with what I do a long time ago. I just do it and don’t try to justify it. But I saw your face twitching when I was telling you about shooting that VC woman while she was peeing, and I can get pretty goddamn hot about that kind of naivete. Americans think the rest of the world views life the way middle-class Presbyterians do. That’s horseshit. There’s lots of ways of viewing life. We point to the Ten Commandments and say human life is sacred, put here to serve God and all that, keeps the troops in line. Others thump on Hindu scripture and say this life is nothing more than a stage on the way to something else. The VC didn’t seem to think much about killing or dying or cutting the nuts off American pilots. Or how about the LA. gangs? They’re just like Charlie. Life means nothing to them, a perfectly flat value structure when it comes to killing. Sometime, maybe I’ll tell you about the plan certain high-placed government officials had to send me into LA. and clean up things a bit, take out the main honchos. Never came off, but they had the idea, and I was thinking about doing it.

  “I remember your book, Danny, Chicago Underground… when’d it come out? Six, seven years ago? I knew I’d seen your face somewhere before, but it took me a while to put it together with a photo on the dust jacket of a book I’d read.”

  “Yeah, it came out in 1987.” Danny was on the run.

  “So you hung around with the wiseguys for a while and think you got the inside dope. Ever see one of ’em do a hit?”

  “No.”

  “For chrissake, you think you got hold of what really happens and put it down on paper, a few spicy little tales of life on the dark side, a few limp inferences about the way you think things operate.” The shooter moved his head in derision, coming into full spate now. “You missed hearing the sound of a man’s kneecaps splintering when they’re whacked with a tire iron, You missed the thirty-eight slug in some guy’s head and more thirty-eight slugs in his wife’s chest because she happened to witness the whole thing. Ever see up close what a bullet does to the insides of a human being, how it goes in small, cutting what’s called a permanent wound channel and then maybe starts bouncing around off the ribs and sternum and spine, like a missile ricocheting around inside Madison Square Garden? If it’s a hollowpoint bullet, it goes in small and fragments inside, steel slivers flying off and slicing into organs every which way. Danny Pastor, Chicago tough guy and street-smart journalist, you haven’t seen anything, you just think you have. You and the rest of the goddamn phonies watching Murder, She Wrote, where the killing takes place offstage, safe and clean, real polite. I love those murder mystery weekends they have at hotels, where everybody pecks around trying to figure out who killed some distant character. I can tell you that if they came snooping around the people in my business, they’d get their insides gouged out by icepicks or worse. The problem is we’ve cheapened the idea of killing, so it’s everyman’s intellectual game, except a few of us actually do it and know what killing means, and it’s an untidy business.”

  He’d moved over onto Danny’s turf, just a little, when he’d mentioned the wiseguys. Danny was feeling puny and embarrassed because he knew the shooter was at least partly right about what he was saying and wanted to get on another track. “Any of your work ever involve the mob?”

  “A little, not much. They stay in the cities mostly, and I don’t have an edge there. They’re pretty shrewd and smart on the concrete. I don’t have a good feel for cities. But in open country they are soft boys and they are mine.” He said it pure and simple, no self-aggran
dizement, just the straight of it all.

  “Piss on it.” Clayton Price stood up. “I’ve had it, got to get some rest. What about the Bronco?”

  “I’ll look at it tomorrow, first light. Sounded like something serious.”

  “What then?”

  “I don’t know. Get a part for it in Mazatlán if I can. Maybe rent a car down there.”

  “We’ll talk about it at first light. If I don’t sleep I’m going to fall over right here.” He started to walk away, then turned, “”fou remember my little lecture back down the road, I hope. I sleep, you do what you have to. But think about the consequences before you do it.”

  “I remember.”

  He walked off, out of the cantina and across the little courtyard. Danny watched the swing of his right leg and thought about the Beretta riding there. The shooter: from the high frontiers of Pluto or somewhere else, who’d followed his own trace through the haze of distant autumns while he, Danny Pastor, had been boogeying down at the University of Missouri, supposedly studying journalism but spending most of his middle two years bouncing on the sweet, eager body of Missy Morganthal. Missy Morganthal, whose father ran an Indiana steel mill and gave lots of money to the UM athletic program. Missy Morganthal, a Kappa Kappa Gamma to Danny’s Sigma Chi. Her tender, blond, ponytailed self perpetually hot and wet and right there for the taking. That is, until she’d hooked up with a young, McLuhan-esque media professor who had a neat apartment, talked her language, and offered something better than South Padre Island over spring break.

  All of that, and out there on a parallel course of his own, the shooter had been coming along through the years. Like some specter, shaped by the dies of his genes and nurture or lack of it, bent on brutal tasks good people would rather not think about. And, if they did think about it, hoping someone else would do them. Danny knew Vietnam had been a blue-collar war, fought by the working class and citizens of color. Fought by young men like the shooter, who went because they were told to go and were scorned afterward by those who didn’t go and would never understand what had really happened there. At that moment, Danny Pastor didn’t feel much like a hotshot journalist who’d set out on this trip with the intent of recapturing old glories. He felt… childlike, and guilty in a way he couldn’t articulate to himself.