Puerto Vallarta Squeeze

by Robert James Waller

  Somewhere down the night streets of Zapata, dogs were snarling. Danny took a last swallow of the beer he’d been holding and looked over at Luz. She was staring toward the door and into the courtyard where the shooter had gone.

  She turned to Danny and touched his face. “Danny, I need you to make love to me.”

  They went to their room and did that, in a quiet, subdued way, looking for some kind of something, safety maybe. And in the course of it, Luz María imagined she was being taken by a black horseman the old people used to talk about, an avenging spirit who rode only on the darkest nights and took people away without warning, especially young women.

  Later that night, Danny awakened and sat by the window, thinking, looking for a way out of the mess. He sat there for a long time. It was around three o’clock, the village sleeping, Western Hemisphere sleeping. Something moved in the shadows, staying close to a row of buildings down the street. A big dog, probably, but then it came under a street lamp for a moment: a jaguar, el tigre. The cat walked Zapata’s streets like a low-slung, rosetted nightwatchman, head swinging from side to side, big paws moving over the cobblestones. Danny’s chair squeaked when he shifted to get a better look. From thirty feet away el tigre looked up at the window where he was sitting, stared at him for ten seconds, yellow green eyes Danny could see even in poor light. The jaguar turned a corner, still walking slowly, and moved up a dark side street out of sight. A minute or two later, Danny heard the death squeal of something, dog or pig or burro. The sound lasted for only an instant.

  Danny returned to bed and lay there. In the stillness, he heard the scratch of a key at the door next to his. After that, a soft click as the shooter’s door opened and swung shut again.

  Soft click of one door in a mountain village called Zapata, and the slam of another on a red Chevy Suburban parked behind a Pemex station south of Mazatlán.

  Walter McGrane, sweaty and jowled, leaned against the car door he’d just shut and kicked at the dust. “Goddamn it all, didn’t we specifically tell ’em all not to shit around with Clayton Price? We’ve got to get it through their thick, wetback heads this ain’t no drunken tourist or small-time heist man we’re dealing with.”

  A Mexican polka was roaring out of the federate truck next to him. “Turn that goddamn radio off, let me think!”

  The radio went dead, and Walter McGrane squinted up at the mercury vapor lights above him. Two men in wind-breakers stood nearby.

  One of them asked, “Think this is Price’s work?”

  Walter McGrane growled back, “Hell, yes. Who else?” He whacked the rear door of the Suburban. “That mess in there has his signature all over it, precision shooting, smallbore handgun. Their weapons haven’t even been fired, they never got a round off. But stashing the truck here was sloppy; I’d have expected better of Price. He’s obviously in a hurry… . Jesús, it smells bad in there.

  “Weatherford”—he looked at one of the men with him—“get on the wire and tell ’em we’re going to concentrate on the Mazatlán area. Get some supporting firepower up here and some trench workers to start scouring the countryside. Tell ’em I want everybody here by early morning.”

  Walter McGrane went into the station for coffee, decided he needed to make water, and stood at the urinal, wishing he were back in Georgetown. If it hadn’t been for the fiasco last year in South Yemen, which wasn’t his fault to begin with as he saw it, he probably wouldn’t even be here.

  “This is a chance to redeem yourself, Walter.” They’d told him that at the briefing.

  Screw redemption. He’d do this one right because he’d been ordered to do it. After it was over, he’d retire and move to his little farm in Vermont, raise apples and sit quiet on the front porch, try not to stare overmuch at the young minister’s wife when she came by for bridge on Thursday evenings.

  THE ROSARY AND CLAYTON PRICE

  Early morning, Friday. Danny under the Bronco’s hood, shooter looking on. Roosters making one hell of a racket all over the village, burros hungry and screeching. Music from a tape deck down the street, Mexican stuff, accordion and guitars and love songs.

  Danny straightened up and leaned on Vito’s fender, staring down at the engine. “Broken fuel pump.”

  “Can we get a new one anywhere around here?”

  “Maybe. Possibly in Mazatlán… probably. There’s a number of these old geezers in Mexico. Might have to go to a junkyard and find a replacement. It’ll take time… a day, maybe more. I could rent a car instead.”

  Clayton Price shook his head. “That won’t do. Rental cars leave a paper trail. They’ll need your driver’s license and so on. I don’t know where this is all heading and whether you’ll even be able to return the car or not. In that case, we’ll have cops looking for a stolen rental car, and they’ll have your driver’s license and address. No good. Can you fix the Bronco if you find a fuel pump?”

  “I think so.”

  “How far are we from the border?”

  “Twenty hours’ driving time… twenty hard hours.” Danny was leaning against a fender, arms folded.

  “It always comes down to crap like this, crucified on a fuel-pump cross or some other screwup.” Clayton Price jammed both hands in his pockets and looked up at the church steeple a block away as the bells began to toll for Friday mass. “Did a job in Africa once, me and another guy. Way back in the bush. Nice clean piece of work, and we were running for Kenya when a fan belt broke, and no spare. Can you imagine that, no spare fan belt for a job that had heavy financing?”

  “What happened?”

  It was the first time Danny had ever seen the shooter actually laugh. “While we were standing around on this dirt track in the middle of absolute, bloody nowhere Africa, two Land Rovers came by, a photo expedition for tourists. They picked us up, and I rode for six hours beside some guy from Ohio who told me everything there was to know about his paper box business in Cleveland. My spotter, a Chicano guy named Juliano, from East LA., ended up running off to Cairo with one of the women on the expedition. I stayed at a fancy safari lodge for three days until I caught a ride to Nairobi. All this time, half the incompetents from something called the Varagunzi Revolutionary Front were stampeding all over central Africa looking for us. Jesús, it was… what’s the word?… surreal. Three months later I heard Juliano had contracted some kind of intestinal parasite in Cairo and died from it after this woman had set him up in Dallas as her gigolo. He sent me a picture of himself sitting on a condo balcony, in a white bathrobe and smoking a cigar.”

  Clayton Price kicked a small rock with the toe of his desert book. “Shit. As Juliano used to say, when things go bad, they really go bad. All right, get on into Mazatlán. Luz and I’ll stay here.”

  Danny figured he knew what the shooter was thinking and how he was thinking. He was gambling Danny wouldn’t go looking for serious law if Luz was still back in the village with him. He was right, mostly. The thought about getting himself out of this and saying to hell with everyone else had already twinkled through his mind during the night. Luz might be his little darlin at the moment, but he’d been picking up on something over the last few months, that Luz might have her own agenda she hadn’t been sharing with him. He’d felt it back in Puerto Vallarta and had been feeling it even more during this wild ride through Mexico, something to do with endings, as if an idea called “Luz&Danny” was curling up like a brown leaf in the Kansas autumns of his boyhood. Still, he couldn’t do that to her, pull out and leave her stranded in a place called Zapata with a prince of darkness.

  An old funky green vehicle of the school bus variety came through the village at noon with Mazatlán whitewashed on its windshield. Below that were listed the villages where it stopped, going and coming, including Zapata. Luz and the shooter walked with Danny to where he caught the bus, broken fuel pump under his arm in a brown paper bag. He looked out the window at them as the bus turned around and headed out of the village, bending along the cobblestone streets, groaning and lurching towar
d Mazatlán. And it struck him at that moment,

  seeing the two of them standing side by side, that Luz somehow looked like she belonged more to the shooter than to him, if she belonged to anybody at all.

  Down through the Sierra Madre foothills and into the flat country again. Past the villages, past the dogs maundering around or sleeping in the dirt. The yellow-brown dogs, sores and sad eyes, long legs and long noses. Must be a breed called Mexican village dog. At the inspection station east of Concordia the bus was waved through. Same five men standing there in almost the identical positions where they’d been the previous evening, like a tableau plunked down in the Mexican countryside.

  In Concordia things looked more ominous. A black-and-white patrol car was parked along the road, two Dodge pickups and two black Suburbans next to it. Also a police bus and a white Dodge van. Federates, police, and three gringos, talking. All of them heavily armed.

  Danny’s bus was halted for a moment while a truckload of soldiers pulled across the highway and stopped near the other vehicles. An older gringo, in a sweat-stained safari jacket and holding a bullhorn, climbed on the hood of a truck and began talking to the others. Below him, another gringo in a windbreaker was translating the other man’s words into Spanish.

  Danny couldn’t make out what was being said. He was thinking of the thin, gray-haired man and the young, soft Mexican woman back in Zapata. A goddamned invasion force was being assembled and it’d be coming into the mountain villages and it’d eventually get to Zapata, sometime… or sooner. Maybe before he returned with a fuel pump for a twenty-five-year-old Bronco. The differential gear in the bus sounded like a pistol hammer being slowly drawn back as it rolled west toward Mazatlán, under the great bend of what more and more looked to Danny like a hostile cosmos.

  Danny had passed through Mazatlán several years back and had no sense of the place other than it was big and full of tourism and shipping and heavy industry. But he had a plan. The rental car agencies supplied off-road vehicles of various stripes so tourists could drive out and ruin the beaches. He took a taxi to a Hertz office in the hotel district and asked where they got their jeeps and so forth repaired, saying he needed an engine part. The nice young Mexican woman at the counter told him, and he taxied over there.

  The mechanic looked at the fuel pump and shook his head, no bomba de gasolina—he didn’t have one, from what Danny could make out. They floundered around in two different languages and got confused. A man standing nearby came over and asked if he could help. He interpreted: The fuel pump was for a very old model and only junkyards might have one, what Danny had already guessed. Danny was given directions to a large salvage place and got back in his taxi. By the time he’d located the junkyard, it had closed for the day.

  The taxi dropped him off at the Hotel Belmar, one of Mazatlán’s original inns. Fine old building with painted tiles, dark woods, and bullfight posters pasted on the walls. When night came he walked north along the sea and into the south end of the main tourist district. American kids everywhere, behaving like assholes. He turned around and eventually found a small restaurant near the hotel. The fish soup was good, and he lingered there for a long time over coffee.

  On the way back to the hotel he picked up an English-language newspaper. The article was on page one: KILLER SOUGHT IN NATIONWIDE MANHUNT. It reported much of what he already knew and went on to say

  One of the victims, George Cooper, was formerly a computer engineer with Frontier Science, Inc., in Dallas, Texas. The second victim, Captain L. K. Reece, United States Navy, received a fatal wound in the neck. Both shootings are believed to be the work of a professional assassin. According to an unidentified source in the United States, the killer is a former Marine Corps sergeant who was well known in the Vietnam conflict for his deadly accuracy with all types of weapons and for his merciless approach to killing. The source described him as “thorough and unrelenting when he takes an assignment. He is deadly, a man without normal human feelings who will kill without mercy and who cares for nothing except his own survival and the task at hand.” The source refused to identify the suspect by name and further declined to say why this particular man is the suspect. Mexican authorities originally tried to suppress all news of the incident, but now have stated the suspect is heavily armed and should be considered extremely dangerous. All branches of the Mexican police as well as the Mexican army and representatives from U.S. law enforcement agencies are cooperating in the manhunt.

  The children of Zapata toward sundown, skipping along the street and singing an old rhyme from the Mexican equivalent of Mother Goose: ”Just as the sun was coming up/ The night before today / A blind man sat writing down/ What a deaf-mute had to say.”

  The women of Zapata toward sundown: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee…” The rosary. And in ragged unison it drifted through the open church door and reached almost to the plaza but failed to make it quite that far on the evening air. If more had come to pray, the appeals for Mary to intercede with her son Jesús on their behalf might have reached farther, but only seven women knelt there about halfway up the center aisle.

  Clayton Price stood in the side entrance to the church and watched the women and listened to them and to Luz María, who had no beads to count but had joined the women anyway after borrowing for her head his blue bandanna with white half-moon decorations on it. The women had already glanced at her and the gringo and gone on praying while Luz María looked over her shoulder once, then once again at the tall, thin man backlighted in the church door. Clayton Price could feel tjie sun’s heat on his shoulders even then when it was low. Inside the church’s thick adobe walls the air was cooler and smelled heavily of oils and incense and sins that had been forgiven long before the ending of this day in the Mexican cordillera, long before Clayton Price ever held a gun in his hands.

  The family of Clayton Price was not religious, but he had prayed once… prayed that he be allowed to die and doing that more with his mind than with his voice, for he hadn’t been able to get any words on his tongue at the very moment when he’d been naked and tied to a bamboo frame, and was being tortured in ways so hideous he’d eventually sent the memories of them to a place where they lay quiet and could not be resurrected unless he consciously chose to bring them back. The scars on his body were restless and tried to make him remember, but they could not, and he had a way of making his eyes go peculiar and unfocused so the scars weren’t visible in any mirrors he might stand before.

  He listened to the women’s voices and paid attention to little movements inside of him as he did, something he wanted to feel, while at the same time disliking the sense of being fragile that seemed to come directly from those feelings. He listened and watched the woman Luz María, thinking of her as she had bathed yesterday in the stream. He’d seen at that time the smooth brown skin and vertebrae standing out against it when she’d bent forward and the breast she’d shown for only a quick moment and smiling as she’d done it. And he remembered just how her body had looked to him and the old things buried deep but coming forward when he’d seen her like that.

  If he had not found that length of wire in the dirt of a Cambodian hut and used it as he had the night he’d escaped and on the way out almost severing the neck of a man who had tortured him, he might never have had those feelings again. For the little men in black had pricked his anal area with sharp bamboo and waved knives around him and pointed them at his testicles, saying “tomorrow” in his language and making a noise with their voices sounding like the cut of a knife itself and laughing when they’d said it.

  There had been some of that in what had happened yesterday at the beach restaurant in Teacapán when the hom-bres were laughing at him. The same twisted faces, the same mean smiles saying, “We will do things to you later.” He’d learned over his life to back out of those situations when nothing was at stake and let them go by and walk away, sometimes hearing laughter saying he was a coward or worse. In his business you did not draw attention
either to yourself or your skills.

  But the old jungle memories and the instinct to survive were only part of why he’d done what he’d done under the thatched roof by the sea in Teacapán. The woman Luz María had been part of it, too, and he hadn’t liked being taunted that way in front of her and wasn’t sure now whether he was only being protective as a father might have been or, on the other hand, being prideful and shielding in the way of all men who rise to fight for a woman they wish to have for their own. He’d lied to Danny when he’d said all eight hombres coming at once would have made a difference in the way things turned out. A little difference maybe, and he would have suffered more than a scrape on his face, but he could have killed them all with his hands and knife and beer bottles and their own machetes turned back on them, or with the Beretta if things had gotten real disorderly. The man with a broken nose and shattered cheekbone had come away lucky; Clayton Price could have taken the man’s eyes just as easily as he broke the cheekbone and the nose on the face above the body where a machete swung.

  And standing there while the rosary sounded, he remembered his private oath taken over thirty years ago that he would never care again, never expose himself to all the hurt caring brought. But the woman Luz María was kneeling before a god Clayton Price didn’t understand and had knelt over her parents’ graves yesterday and prayed then, and was praying again here. And in a way he could not grasp, her prayers seem valid to him and should be answered, if this god she prayed to had any favors left to give after all He’d been asked for.