Puerto Vallarta Squeeze (14 page)

He let out a long, slow breath and talked low. “Everybody smile. We’re just dumb tourists from Mazatlán out here wandering
around.”

Given the condition of the Bronco, Danny had his doubts about the plausibility of that explanation, but he couldn’t think
of anything better.

“Buenas tardes,”
Danny said.

The pistol man said good afternoon back to him and bent over, looking in at Vito’s occupants. He stared for a few seconds
at each of their faces, ’”feu have fruit or vegetables?”

Luz said they did, showing him apples and oranges that were getting rough after two days in the heat.

The inspector said nothing, then looked at the shooter and smiled. “Bad scrape, amigo,” tapping his own face when he said
it. “Trouble?”

The shooter may or may not have understood. He grinned back at the inspector, then shrugged and turned toward Luz, handing
the conversation over to her.

“He fell while we were climbing rocks along the coast.” Luz was giving the man her very best come-along-and-see-what-I-have
smile while she spoke. She glanced at the shooter and switched to English. “The rocks along the coast were very slippery,
weren’t they, causing you to fall and hurt your face.”

The shooter pointed at his wound, still grinning, then tightened his face into a grimace and said, “Oww… very sore, very dumb
thing to do,” shaking his head gently from side to side, playing the ignorant gringo who didn’t understand how treacherous
sea rocks could be. Watery theatrics, but they seemed to do the job.

The man looked at him again, then smiled and spoke passable English, “You must be more careful, amigo. Mexico is a dangerous
place for those not used to it.”

He straightened up and swept his hand forward, motioning for them to proceed. Danny let out the clutch easy as he could and
gradually accelerated toward the Sierra Madre. In the mirror, he could see the pistol man standing with his hands on his hips,
watching them move away. A few moments later, as he’d been instructed to do, the man went inside the kiosk and picked up a
telephone.

Foothills of the Sierra Madre. Piedra Blanca, Magistral, Guasima, Zapotillo—villages not on any map, but nevertheless straddling
the road or lying a few clicks to one side.

The shooter said, “Good job back there, both of you. Now, we need a place to lay up for a day or two, get a feeling for how
serious the hunters are. Pretty serious, I’m guessing. We’ll stand out too much in these villages, word’ll get passed around
about us hanging out. Am I right or wrong about that?”

“Pretty much right,” Danny told him. “Every village has what we’d think of as a local cop, a constable. He won’t be armed
and won’t bother us directly, but it’s his job to notify other law about any unusual goings-on in his village. Eventually
the police drive up to the village and take a look for themselves. Sometimes they let a week gp by before they get around
to it. With all that’s happened, however, they might respond right away. We’ll stick out, no doubt about that.”

“Any ideas?”

“Up the road about sixty miles is a place I’ve heard about, called Zapata. Friend of mine hung around there for a couple of
weeks a while back. It’s quaint, been turned into a minor tourist stop. Buses haul tourists up from Mazatlán for a few hours,
let ’em eat and take a walk. They go back home and say they’ve been to a traditional Mexican village. There’s some kind of
place to stay, cantina or two, maybe a restaurant. A few gringos live there permanently from what I understand, so we won’t
be quite as noticeable as in some of these other places.”

“Let’s take a look at it.”

Around a curve, hombre on a chestnut horse coming the other way, riding on the edge of the road. Mustache and goatee, aristocratic
and handsome in the face, black vest and pants, white shirt open at the neck, black flat-crowned hat and black boots, saddle
inlaid with silver. An apparition coming out of a lavender evening. He watched them pass, then moved down the road. Mexico…
that way: garbage and cruelty, beauty and surprise, nobility on a horse in the middle of nowhere.

Seventy-five minutes later and a mile west of Zapata, the Bronco began jerking and made weird, threatening noises under the
hood.

The shooter came to attention. “What’s that?”

Danny was hunched over the wheel, looking at gauges. “Don’t know, sounds bad.”

They limped up to the Zapata turnoff, rolled down into a deep valley on the edge of the village, then began climbing again.
Up front the noise got louder. The Bronco gave signs of stopping completely, leapt forward a few feet, halted for a moment,
then jerked and humped its way up the hill. They made it to the top and sputtered along narrow cobblestone streets, making
a not-so-grand entrance into the central plaza area of the village.

The plaza was square and thirty yards on a side, with a gazebo in the middle and lots of trees. A cobblestone street circumscribed
the plaza and separated it from buildings on all four sides. On the south a huge old church rose up and dominated everything.
Beyond the church were mountains, and valleys in evening shadow. To the west was a long, single-story building divided into
individual residences, with a little shop at the south end near the church. The east side was mainly a combination curio shop
and residence about forty feet long. On the north was what they were looking for, a tourist version of a cantina and a restaurant
advertising rooms for rent.

Danny stopped the Bronco and looked around. A few teenage couples were involved in temperate courting rituals around the plaza.
Old men tilted back in chairs against the outside walls of their houses, staring at the gringos who’d just staggered in. Vito
was sounding as if death were imminent, so Danny lurched it behind the restaurant, spooking a wandering burro, and shut down.
The Bronco died with a rattle in its throat.

The streetlights on all four corners of the plaza came on, and Zapata, indeed, looked quaint and picturesque at night. Electricity
had arrived, which was surprising, since most of these villages didn’t have it yet. Later on, Danny would hear Zapata was
the home village of Mexico’s former president and had been favored because of that. He slumped over the steering wheel, watching
bugs fly around street lamps. The three of them sat there for a moment, saying nothing, letting down from a strange, violent
day. San Bias and the swimming pool at Las Brisas seemed as if they were in another time, another universe, yet they’d been
there only this morning.

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.”