Puerto Vallarta Squeeze (17 page)

“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-aggrandizement, 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.

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.

E
arly 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 toward 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.