Puerto Vallarta Squeeze

by Robert James Waller

  She was called Nacha and spoke no English. But she and Danny got around the floor just fine. He took her back after two songs, thanked her, and asked another señorita who was sitting next to her. Eventually he worked his way down the line—the thin ones and heavy ones, pretty and otherwise—and, given he didn’t know when or if ever he might dance again, there was something especially good and true about dancing with a row of señoritas on a warm May evening in the middle of his life.

  THE RUN FOR EL NORTE

  Danny, Luz, and the shooter left the dance shortly after midnight when things were starting to heat up a bit. Two of the hombres had begun pushing each other around over in one corner of the floor a few minutes earlier, and it was time to go. They walked along the cobblestones toward their rooms, stopped for a moment, and looked at a quarter moon rocking in the southwest, out across the foothills of the Sierra Madre. Luz was humming a tune the band had played, and Danny was sure it was the song to which she and Clayton Price had first danced.

  But the dancing wasn’t finished. They passed an open doorway, and inside a woman held a baby high in the light of a bare, single bulb, singing to the baby as she moved slowly around a small room in waltz time. Around the room she danced and the baby in its white nightshirt smiling down at the woman’s face and gurgling with pleasure. Danny looked at the shooter who was looking at Luz who was smiling. All of them felt as if they were spying on something so private it belonged only to the woman and the baby, and they walked on. They’d seen some old, old dance neither Danny Pastor nor Clayton Price understood very well. But women understand that kind of thing; Luz understood, and Danny hurt for her, guessing she was remembering a hot July day in Puerto Vallarta when she’d done something she hadn’t wanted to do because he’d insisted, and he’d bought her a Panasonic tape player afterward. And he was sorry for that, too. Over the last few days, Danny Pastor had started to feel sorry about a lot of things.

  Danny was tired, but the shooter and Luz seemed reluctant to let the evening close. Eventually, though, they went to their separate rooms, where Danny and Luz made love. It was good, as always, but there was something a little distant about her, as if she were someplace else even while she pressed her belly against his.

  He awakened when full dawn was somewhere east of the mountains, silence and a night world outside. Luz was gone. She came in a few minutes later, naked and walking soft, lying down beside Danny, who said nothing and feigned sleep. She lay there softly humming the same tune she’d been humming a few hours earlier. And something in the sound of her told Danny she was smiling.

  Danny slept again, an hour maybe, coming awake when he heard loud and urgent knocking on their door.

  “”Yes, yes, hold on,” yanking up his jeans.

  Clayton Price, standing there with first light coming up behind him. The roosters and donkeys were in full chorus, and dogs were fighting somewhere down the street, sounding like wolves as they tore at one another.

  “Get up and get ready to move,” the shooter said. “Right now.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Don’t know. Something’s not right, got bad feelings in my gut. I’m going to look around. I’ll be back in five minutes. Be ready when I get here.”

  Danny shook Luz into consciousness. When the shooter returned, they were dressed, scratchy with sleep but waking up fast. Luz sat on the bed, Danny leaned on the wash-stand, feeling the bulge of the twenty-five hundred dollars he’d taken out of its sleeping-bag hiding place and stuffed in the left front pocket of his jeans. The shooter closed the door and stood there in his jeans, denim shirt, and photographer’s vest. On the wall behind and above his head a small gecko lizard glued itself to the adobe, tail toward the ceiling and silent and still, waiting for something of worth to pass its way.

  “I made a phone call last night. Went down and got the shopkeeper out of bed, said it was an emergency. I called a guy in Monterrey.” He nodded toward Danny. “Called him the other day while you were in Mazatlán and made some preliminary arrangements. He’s an old friend of mine from the military, high placed now in the U.S. diplomatic service. I saved his ass in the jungle one time and he owes me. I asked him about this whole situation. He told me because I hit the naval officer in Puerto Vallarta, word is out that I’m a loose cannon, no longer to be trusted, and that I might be in the process of settling old scores all over the place. That’s why you saw the official-looking gringos in Concordia. They’re real bad guys, CIA or worse. My Monterrey contact says everybody’s after us—after me, at least. I didn’t say anything about the two of you. On the other hand, there’s plenty of people who’ve seen the three of us together over the last few days. In any case, this is starting to look like Cortes’s march out of Tenochtitlan.”

  The shooter again amazed Danny; now he was citing Mexican history. Worse, he was beginning to see himself as Hernan Cortes when the Mexica tried to stop him by breaching a causeway linking his island redoubt to the mainland. That mapping made Luz into Cortes’s concubine, Malinche. And Danny… Danny into what? Driver, foot soldier at the worst. Chicago had never been like this. There, Danny had gone back to his apartment at night after interviewing the local wiseguys. This was different—he couldn’t go home and put on his pajamas and Dave Brubeck.

  The shooter was still talking, little grin on his face, almost as if he were enjoying this. Christ, maybe he is, Danny thought. He started wondering if Clayton Price had put himself into this situation just so he could work his way out or maybe he didn’t want to get out at all. Danny took refuge in the thought that Cortes had made it across the causeway with at least some of his force intact and listened to the shooter talk.

  “Here’s how it lies. I don’t think there’s a chance in hell we can get out of this by road. According to my source in Monterrey, the main highways are roadblocked and anybody who even looks suspicious is being hauled in. I had to call in all my chits, but I’ve managed to arrange for a chopper to pick me up. That’s why I made the call last night, to get confirmation. It’s coming in about twenty minutes. It’ll fly me up over the border, refueling on the way, and set me down outside of Brownsville. From there I’ll make a run for wherever I can get to.”

  He was talking crisp, giving a military briefing, getting his endgame under way. “The chopper will come in from the east over the mountains and land in a clearing at a mine entrance below the village. Luz and I were down there the other day.”

  Danny remembered what Luz had said on Saturday, that the shooter had made a telephone call and kept saying, “LC, silver mine.” She was close. What he was saying was, “LZ, silver mine”—landing zone at the silver mine.

  “You have a choice.” He was looking at Danny. “Come along on the chopper or try and drive the Bronco out of here. By the time they figure out what’s going on, you should be back in Puerto Vallarta, telling people you took a little trip around the countryside to see some places you’d never seen, had a scrap with your girlfriend, and she went off somewhere on her own. Oh, yes, one other thing. Taped to the back of your toilet in Puerto Vallarta is the gun I used to make the hit there, “fou might want to get rid of it.”

  ”You mean you were going to frame me with the killing?”

  “It wasn’t a bad idea. You saw me make the hit, I tip off the cops about the gun after I get to the States. They find the gun and arrest you, throw you in the slammer while they sort it out. I doubt if they would have actually believed you did it, but if they couldn’t find anyone else, the gun would be more than enough evidence to put you away or hang you or whatever they do down here. That way they could say they’d found their man and close the book on it.”

  “You bastard“

  The shooter smiled. “Like I said before, it’s a tough, cruel game. But you’ve done your part, and I’m giving you absolution and freedom. By the way, Luz wants to come north with me.”

  “Like hell!”

  “Ask her.”

  Danny looked at Luz, and she nodded, clear eyed an
d ready to go with him. “Why, for chrissake?” He already knew—Luz wanted el Norte, and the shooter was her postage—but asked the question anyway.

  She didn’t say anything, glanced over at the shooter.

  He said, “I’m not sure I’m capable of loving at all. But, Danny, you love too timidly. I don’t know which is worse, You have this offhand way of treating her most of the time, as if she’s a partially reformed street whore… . She told me about her past. She says I treat her with respect, “You figure it out.”

  Danny took a long, shaky breath and looked out the window for a moment, then over at Luz and noticed she was wearing the shooter’s bracelet.

  He saw where Danny was looking. “The bracelet has a four-ounce gold nugget under the blue coloring. If things go bad, she’s got traveling money.”

  The shooter hesitated for a moment, letting the new arrangements sink in and settle down, then dug in his pocket and handed a roll of bills to Danny. “Here’s the rest of the five thousand I owe you. Make up your mind, Danny Pastor. I scouted around for a few minutes and didn’t see anything out there, but I’ve learned to trust my gut, and my gut doesn’t feel good this morning. Come with us if you want. We’ll blow up the Bronco with gasoline on our way out. If that doesn’t work for you, take the Bronco and make a run for it. By yourself you’ll probably make it; nobody’s looking for a lone gringo.”

  “What’s your gut telling you?” Danny asked.

  “Not sure. I thought I heard something up on the highway, what sounded like gears grinding on one of those old deuce-and-a-half troop carriers. I walked around a bit, didn’t see anything. But, doing what I do, there’s a sixth sense you develop over the years. And you pay attention to those feelings.”

  “What do you think is happening?”

  The shooter looked at his watch. “The chopper’ll be here in fifteen minutes. Like I said, not sure. If I had to guess, I’d say those cops last night recognized me. You saw the way they looked…”

  Clayton Price never finished his sentence, pausing and cocking his head toward the sound of boots in the interior courtyard below the room. He tugged up his pant leg and pulled the Beretta, cracked the door, and looked out.

  Then, turning for a moment toward Luz and Danny, with that half-and-hard smile of his, some old bowstring inside him coming back taut enough to snap, and said, “It’s gonna be a sonuvabitch.” He went down on his belly and opened the door, crawling toward the edge of the balcony.

  Danny could hear voices below and see the shooter holding the Beretta in both hands, steadying it. The sound of it going off in the enclosed courtyard was like a howitzer. He shot three more times and jumped to his feet. “Now! Follow me!”

  Danny’s decision point, another branch in the complicated tree that had begun in El Niño six nights ago. He could have just hunkered down behind one of the beds and tried to explain his way out of it later on. But he never considered that for some reason and obeyed the shooter’s orders without hesitating. It seemed like the right thing to do then, the force and energy of time-present subverting other alternatives.

  They ran along the balcony and down the stairs. Three men dressed in uniforms of the Mexican army were lying on the tile, rifles scattered around. Two had holes in their faces, the third was bleeding from the chest and was tossing about, moaning.

  They made it to the cantina doorway and looked out. More uniforms were moving through the plaza trees, across the narrow street directly in front of them.

  The shooter was talking fast. “There’s a side door out through the kitchen. Take the hillside path to the silver mine. Luz knows where it is. Wait for me there. Stay low; there’ll be some serious people outside who’ll take down anything they feel like.”

  He grabbed Danny’s shoulder, looked at him straight on, and grinned again in that strange, hard way of his, face crinkled but eyes serious. “We should’ve bought the goddamned ocelot… should’ve done that, Danny Pastor. See you at the silver mine.”

  He gave Danny a get-going push and turned to the front door of the cantina. Danny grabbed Luz and followed orders. They went out through the kitchen and hunkered down behind some bushes. Four soldiers came off the plaza and walked toward the cantina, three of them with rifles leveled at the front door and the fourth carrying an automatic weapon. Having watched the shooter work before and knowing he prioritized the enemy’s firepower, Danny said to himself, “The bozo with the automatic weapon will get it first.” He did and went down, clutching his throat with bloody hands as the shooter’s gun snapped.

  Then a high, hard fist slapped Zapata, setting free again all the ancient furies a mountain village had seen in its long past—the French, the Spanish, the Mexican army. And once again Zapata exploded into a dust storm of noise and chaos and cruelty.

  Of the four soldiers who had approached the cantina, the remaining three ran back toward the trees in the plaza. The Beretta again, and one of them fell, spinning around as he hit the cobblestones. At the same time more soldiers and what looked like federates were running up the street from the west, coming by el centro where Luz and Danny and Clayton Price had danced last night.

  As Danny Pastor will tell you, if he hadn’t been so damned scared at the time, he could have seen it all as a thing of beauty. The images are still crystalline, and he eventually has come to see it that way, as a thing of terrible beauty, when he thinks back on what occurred.

  The shooter came off the cantina porch, running low to the ground and firing. He made it to the corner of the plaza and took out one of the federates galloping along in cowboy boots. From there, it became a violent ballet. Shooter running… and jumping… running and jumping gracefully over the fence surrounding the plaza… through the trees. Sound of weapons firing every which way. Bullets digging into adobe walls around the plaza or slicing leaves and bark from trees, windows shattering.

  From his hiding place, Danny could somehow admire the shooter at that moment, saw him as an old lion surrounded by jackals or maybe a bull at one of Coria’s bloody festivals, take your choice. He was hedged in, but under control and fighting, no panic that Danny could see. It was a place he’d been before. Danny lost count, but Clayton Price was knocking down soldiers as they ran toward him, killing some, wounding others.

  Places his shots… one at a time… not every shot is a

  killing shot… but every one of them seems to hit a man.

  … Clayton Price moving… shots from left… spin… return fire…

  That low-crouching run of his… through the trees,

  sputter of automatic weapons… no quarter given… final stuff… hard stuff

  … hard and cruel and no quarter taken… sunlight… bright morning…

  two burros, wild in streets… one of them running through a machine-gun

  burst… falling… kicking on the cobblestones and screaming a dying

  burro scream, horrible sound…

  shooter in behind gazebo

  … windbreakered man in the church doorway, bracing an unusual-looking

  rifle against the stone next to him and thinking one

  shot, one kill…

  The soldiers retreated and began taking the gazebo apart stone by stone with automatic weapons fire. A white van roared into the plaza area. The burro lying in the street caused the driver to swerve, and Walter McGrane covered his face as the van smashed through the plaza fence and into a tree. Another man in a windbreaker crawled out the rear door of the van, staggered to his feet, and began a hobbled run, swinging a short-barreled Remington shotgun in an arc before him. A Mexican soldier, wild and panicked and shooting at anything approximating a hostile target, opened up on the man in the windbreaker, who took him down with one blast from the Remington. An internecine fire-fight erupted, with other soldiers turning their guns on the windbreaker, thinking he was the man they’d come for. The Remington blew apart another soldier, before the wind-breaker shouted loud enough in expletive Spanish that he was not the target.

 
The shooter was crawling fast, away from the gazebo and south toward the fence surrounding the plaza. Danny could see a man in the church doorway, looking down the scope of a rifle pointed toward the plaza fence only thirty yards away. At that moment the rifle jerked upward without firing, the village priest struggling with the rifleman, screaming about the desecration of the place where Jesus lived.

  Clayton Price saw the priest and the rifleman and knew he’d come within a second or two of dying there in the grass. He made the fence, staying low and looking over his shoulder, hearing the automatic weapons still firing at the gazebo, splinters of stone flying into the air from hundreds of bullets. The sniper finally disengaged himself from the priest and hit him full across the nose with a quick hand chop. As the priest fell, the man brought the rifle up again and was scoping for his target when the slug from Clayton Price’s Beretta slammed into his chest. He staggered back into the church darkness as Clayton Price came to his feet and ran for the door where the sniper had been standing.

  Danny saw the shooter running toward the church, saw him make the door and dart inside, probably heading out the side entrance and down the hill behind the church.

  Luz and Danny began running along the hillside path, hidden from the plaza area by trees and houses. They hurdled a sow and her piglets lying in the middle of the path. The sow got up, grunting, piglets squealing.

  The path forked. Luz pointed right, and they ran that way, starting to go downhill. She stumbled and fell on loose gravel, rolling fifteen feet down the slope, tearing herself on rocks and ripping her blouse. As Danny pulled her up, he heard the thuk-thuk of a helicopter coming in low through a cut in the mountains. They were above the main part of the village, and Danny stood there for a few seconds, trying to get a fix on what was happening. Below him and Luz,