Puerto Vallarta Squeeze (24 page)

But Clayton Price didn’t need Danny’s help. He scrambled behind a bush, jammed a clip into the Beretta, went to his belly,
and waited until he saw shotgun man’s feet. The Beretta popped and a bullet blew into the man’s right knee. As the man staggered
and instinctively reached downward to touch shattered bone, the shooter came out low and hit the man with another round. The
man staggered and fell forward, the business end of his Remington pumpgun plunging into the earth and simultaneously discharging,
blowing up in his face. The soldiers behind retreated and went to ground, wondering what the hell they were doing in the middle
of a bunch of crazy gringos trying to kill each other.

The shooter was running again, heading toward the silver mine. Luz and Danny began to move fast, Luz bleeding on her face
and arms and back from the fall. Helicopter coming in, getting ready to set down. They met up with the shooter fifty yards
from the landing zone. He had wide sweat circles under his arms, the denim shirt sticking to him and bloody on one shoulder.
He’d been hit, but not bad, evidently. He looked like a big cat, moved like one, some kind of curious light in his eyes, wild
and yet focused, his chest pumping for air, out on the rice paddies again.

The three of them crouched there, looking around. Behind them, soldiers had seen the helicopter landing and, regrouped by
an officer, were creeping through scrub trees and brush toward the silver mine.

“This is it! Move!” the shooter hissed. He grabbed Luz’s hand and started running toward the chopper settling onto the gravel
at the mine entrance, rotor blades blowing brown dust up and around it.

Coming to his feet, Danny slipped on loose stones, got up, slipped again, and followed Luz and the shooter, who were already
fifteen yards ahead of him. Gunshots from behind, small poofs of earth where the bullets hit. Through blowing dust and the
sweat running into his eyes, Danny could see Luz and the shooter up ahead, Luz in almost total fatigue, being dragged by an
arrow named Clayton Price.

We might make it, Danny thought. We might make it… we’re going to make it,
by God.

“Run, Luz!” Danny screamed.

The cargo door on the chopper slid open. Through the swirl of dust Danny could see two men squatting inside, and both men
were pointing automatic weapons directly at Luz and Clayton Price. And the men were firing the weapons, not over Luz’s and
the shooter’s heads, but
at
them and at Danny. Danny hit the ground at full tilt, sliding along on sharp gravel, tearing his chest. Ahead of him the
shooter skidded to a stop and started pulling Luz back in Danny’s direction. She was confused, Clayton Price shouting at her
to run back the way they’d come.

Oh no—Danny was screaming inside himself—oh
no!
… goddammit
no!
—not this, not Luz.

The line of fire from the chopper swept across Luz and the shooter like a big, invisible knife blade. They jerked and spun,
stumbled and went down, the shooter still holding on to her hand, blood coming from her face. The shooter wrapped himself
around Luz, covering her, aiming his pistol toward the chopper. He scrubbed one of the men with his second shot. The other
man ducked back inside the cargo bay out of sight.

The shooter struggled to his feet, somehow he did that, pulling Luz with him. A bullet had sliced across and through her cheek,
and she was bleeding from three other places on her chest, but she was still alive, and Danny could see her clawing Clayton
Price’s shirt, grabbing his hair, her head lolling from side to side, only vaguely aware of what was happening, death-terror
and instinct taking over.

He lifted her onto his left shoulder, her legs to the front of him, and began stumbling toward Danny. And lastingly curls
that memory in the mind of Danny Pastor, the image of Clayton Price carrying Luz María through the morning dust, his legs
splayed and beginning to buckle but still coming on and refusing to cease what it was Clayton Price did best. And never, ever,
in the times to come, would Danny forget the look on the shooter’s face at that moment— bleeding from a half dozen parts of
his body and with one ear nearly missing, he was no longer human but something else altogether, gone completely feral, eyes
crazy-wide with a transcending agony all their own and looking not at Danny but somewhere back of Danny, living now in another
place only a man such as Clayton Price could ever understand. With Luz balanced on one shoulder, he brought the Beretta up
and began firing over Danny’s head at whatever was coming from behind.

Danny rolled into a brushy ditch and yelled, “This way!” The shooter, vest and pants and shirt blood soaked, eyes glazed over
and someplace else, nonetheless heard him and started toward where Danny was lying. There wasn’t much left of the woman over
his shoulder, the soft, brown woman who only a few hours before had been wearing a flower in her hair and a yellow dress and
dancing with a man who had never danced before. Luz María was no longer moving, eyes opalescent and head dangling in a lifeless
way even as Clayton Price carried her.

An automatic weapon in the chopper’s cargo bay opened up again. The shooter stumbled and went to his knees, somehow got back
to his feet once more, still balancing Luz on his shoulder. Danny could see bullets marching through the dust and then up
and through Clayton Price and Luz. As the bullets cut into them, Clayton Price twisted toward the chopper and tried to aim
the Beretta, but what had once been his face disappeared instantly in a spray of flesh and bone. He fell a few feet from the
ditch, Luz tumbling from his shoulder. The two of them lay tangled, their bodies jerking as a burst from the automatic weapon
made one final pass over them. After that, the soldiers began firing at the helicopter, and the automatic weapon inside the
cargo door turned its attention to them.

The helicopter lifted off, and it never has been clear to Danny just who was on what side that morning. In all the confusion
nobody apparently knew who was an ally and who was the enemy, so everybody had simply started shooting at everyone else. The
soldiers on the ground hadn’t been told the chopper was on their side, or maybe somebody didn’t want them to know. Or maybe
it wasn’t, maybe there were three sides. After a while, it didn’t make any difference.

Danny checked himself. Chest bleeding bad from where he’d slid on the rocks, but all right otherwise. He called out for the
shooter, for Luz. No answer. He didn’t expect one. From where the two of them lay in the dust, there was only silence, and
Danny was sure it would be that way forever. Clayton Price had stopped circling the ponds of autumn, had come to rest, and
had taken Luz María with him.

Danny pushed up and ran along a shallow arroyo, staying low and eventually working his way up toward the main part of the
village. The shooting had stopped, villagers were peering out of windows and doors at bodies littered around the plaza. Not
as many bodies as it seemed to Danny when all the shooting had been taking place. Three men were down near the plaza, two
who were injured slumped against the gazebo. The white Ford van was burning, black smoke rising high and fast into the mountain
air. Inside the van, a gringo in a sweat-stained safari jacket lay crumpled between the rammed-back engine and his seat. Danny
watched from behind a building as the van exploded and set four of the plaza’s trees on fire.

Danny made it to the Bronco, put it in four-wheel drive, and maneuvered through the jungle, then slowly climbed up a hillside
northeast of the village. On the main highway, the Durango road, he looked back down into the village and beyond. Near the
silver mine, men were dragging bodies through the dust, leaving dark, wet trails.

He worked on getting his head clear and drove up the highway, taking the mountain road toward Ponuco. When he got to the turnoff
for the old Guadalupe church, he bumped Vito along the riverbed for a mile, where he parked it behind some brush. Don José
Fierro heard the Bronco grinding over river rocks and came down to investigate. The affairs of the world were not his, and
he cared nothing for what might have happened beyond the small universe over which he watched.

Danny stayed with the Keeper of Guadalupe for three days. Don José Fierro sloshed up a concoction of river mud and something
else, smearing it on the deep cuts Danny had sustained from diving onto gravel. Whatever it was, it worked, and the cuts stopped
bleeding. Don José gave him one of his shirts to wear, three sizes too small, but Danny was grateful and left a hundred bucks
when he pulled out on the evening of the third day. The old man didn’t care about money but took it and waved in the general
direction of the church, indicating the money would be used for repair and maintenance.

Two miles from the Durango road, Danny stopped and got out. The cliff on which he stood dropped away for a thousand feet,
ending in heavy trees and brush at the bottom. He pointed Vito toward the cliff, put the gears in neutral, and shut off the
engine. Two hard pushes and the Bronco went over the side, bounced in a tear of metal on an outcropping three hundred feet
down, then fell clean all the way to where it finally crashed into trees and brush. The last few days still seemed like a
movie, all of it.

An hour later, Danny flagged down a bus headed for Mazatlán. The bus wound through the mountains and when it passed the village
of Zapata, Danny stared straight ahead.

On the edge of Concordia, furniture makers worked in the twilight and smoke from cooking fires drifted over the highway. Children
played by the roadside and brown dogs hung around restaurant tables. To Danny, thinking about the small war that had occurred
in Zapata only three days past, it seemed curious somehow that life had not altered for these people. What appeared large
to Danny was nothing to them. Mexico had absorbed the blows and gone on, as it always had.

A few miles east of Concordia, the bus passed through the waters of a small creek, and Danny Pastor looked upstream toward
the place where he and Clayton Price and Luz had bathed a week ago. At the Pemex station south of Mazatlán, the burned remains
of a white Ford van sat off to one side by itself. It was twilight, and rush hour, and there were long lines of vehicles waiting
for gasoline.

D
anny stopped in Mazatlán and stayed for two days in a tourist hotel, figuring nobody would pay much attention to a gringo
tourist; the town was full of them. He left the room only once, to buy a couple of shirts and a new pair of jeans, some newspapers.
Nothing in the papers about the shootout, but it would have been old news by then; five days had gone by since it happened.
Later on there was a brief article in a regional edition of
Time
with the headline
SHOOTOUT IN THE MOUNTAINS
.

The piece was sketchy, stating only that a gun battle between elements of the Mexican army and a deranged ex-marine had taken
place in the Mexican village of Zapata. An army commander was quoted as saying the mission was successfully completed after
a brief, early morning skirmish in which no soldiers were injured and the ex-marine had been killed. In the article, the shooter
was correctly identified as Clayton Price, and it was indicated not much was known about him except for his military career,
which lasted eight years. There was mention of his Purple Heart and several other medals awarded for his service in Vietnam
and quoted an unidentified diplomatic source as saying Mr. Price had turned into a degenerate killer after he left the military.
Luz was listed only as an “unidentified Mexican woman who was the assassins gun moll.” It also said an unidentified white
male was with them, but no trace of him had been found.

In Mazatlán, Danny purchased a battered Dodge pickup, using a fair chunk of the five thousand Clayton Price had given him.
He headed down Route 15 toward Puerto Vallarta, stopped in Escuinapa, and bought a large flashlight along with bolt cutters
and wire clippers. Through the late afternoon, he took the road west toward Teacapán and slowed down six miles out. The cage
was still there under a banana tree, the ocelot still pacing. Danny parked at an abandoned pier on the lake or estuary or
whatever the backwater was called and pretended to be interested in the scenery.

After dark he pulled the truck up near the ocelot and gingerly approached the cage, keeping his flashlight pointed at the
ground until he reached the cage. The cat stopped pacing and snarled, lunged at the wire, and hooked a fang over it. It wasn’t
going to be easy.

Danny let the cat quiet down a little and decided to use the long-handled bolt cutters, closing down on the padlock holding
the cage shut. The steel was low grade, and he got through it on the second try. He hooked the bolt cutters onto the door
wire and swung it open, dropping the cutters and running for the truck all at the same time. The cat was out of the cage and
bounding across the road toward a nearby field before Danny could shut the truck door. He watched
el gato
moving fast through moonlight, into long grass, gone.

By the following afternoon, the battered Dodge was just north of Puerto Vallarta. Danny hardly recalled the road down from
Mazatlán, thinking and remembering and shaking his head at his own arrogance and how desire replaces judgment on warm night
in a Mexican beach town or, for that matter, on white porch swings in Kansas.

He made a right turn, and twenty-four miles west the road ended at the beach village of Punta de Mita. Danny bought a beer
and walked out on the sand, sitting by the water’s edge. In the quiet, he listened to the waves and thought about Luz, remembering
how they had come here and swum naked at night. She’d bobbed up from under the water, pushing her long black hair back over
her shoulders, laughing as she’d wrapped her legs around the wild expatriate called Danny Pastor. That was a long time ago,
it seemed.

Danny sat there for hours, walking back to the beach restaurant for more beer, then returning to his place in the sand. The
restaurant closed and still he sat there, looking out at the rocky islands and remembering María de la Luz Santos. God, she
was beautiful… and warm… and deep-down loving and all of those things for which he hadn’t appreciated her enough when she
was there with him. He wished then he had married her and taken her north with him. He didn’t feel much like a wild expatriate
anymore. He felt stupid and alone and sorry.