Puerto Vallarta Squeeze (4 page)

The shooter was slowly moving his head back and forth like a radar antenna, scanning the street ahead and both sides of it.

“It’s been tried.” He spoke in a detached way, as if he were on time-share, concentrating on something else. “Five of the
boy-os made a move on me in Manila once.”

“What happened?”

“Didn’t work out the way they’d planned. Overconfidence will do that to you.”

Danny should have listened to those words. Later on and looking back, he was pretty sure the shooter was trying to tell him
something, but he’d been concentrating on getting them through the streets and thinking about what this story would do for
his wallet
and
his reputation—a whole new rejuvenated Danny Pastor, comeback kid and demon of the talk shows, recipient of literary prizes
and hero to right-thinking citizens everywhere.

He’d never realized how tricky it is to know something about somebody and not let them know you know when you’re trying to
help them for all the wrong reasons. Insurgentes was a bright, major thoroughfare running north through town, eventually tying
into other streets and leading toward the airport. The problem was how to get out of town without being noticed and at the
same time not be too obvious about it so he didn’t tip off the shooter about knowing more than he was supposed to know.

Danny parked the Bronco on a side street near the Rio Cuale and went around the corner to a small grocery store on Insurgentes.
Fruit, candy bars, cheese, loaf of bread, two gallons of drinking water. And a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, economy size. As he
climbed in the Bronco, a truckload of police bounced north along Insurgentes, siren blaring.

“What’s all the excitement?” the shooter asked, sounding innocent and only a little curious.

“The hombre tending the store says there’s been some kind of shooting over on Ordaz. That’s what the sirens and traffic are
about. The
federates
probably will be stopping everybody on the highway out, looking at papers, searching cars, and all the rest of that good
crap. I’m going to take a back route that’s a little rough, but it’ll save us a lot of time and hassle.” Pretty decent, reasonable
explanation. Christ, Danny said to himself, I’m already thinking like a criminal.

“That sort of thing happen often here? Shootings?” The shooter was lying back, seeming to be relaxed, flicking cigarette ashes
out the side as they bumped over cobblestones. But he never stopped looking everywhere at once.

“Not very often. Lot of petty stuff, not much heavy violence.”

“Who got hit?” Interesting choice of words. Most people would have said “shot” or something along those lines.

“Don’t know for sure.” Danny swerved to miss a rumbling bus carrying night workers north toward the big tourist hotels. “Apparently
an American navy officer and some other gringo. Most likely a bar fight.”

He couldn’t see Luz’s face, but she had to be wondering just what the hell he was doing and why he was saying less than he
knew. And the bar fight explanation was a little weak, since American naval officers weren’t given over to that sort of thing.

Danny took the Bronco into the back streets of Puerto Vallarta. Across the Rio Cuale at a shallow spot, through the storage
yard of an old foundry, in behind the new Pizza Hut, and down a dirt road where the poorest of the Mexican workers lived,
which included most of the locals. He could still hear sirens six blocks west, in the general direction of El Niño. The
policia
and probably the army, maybe
even federates,
were running around like malevolent Keystone Kops, but most of the regular people were turning in for the night. Whatever
had happened was none of their business. So what if a couple of rich gringos were down on the cobblestones. If it wasn’t bullets,
it’d be AIDS or dope or booze. A lot of them came here, running away from something back home and toward a sleazy, inelegant
end in the white enclaves of Puerto Vallarta. For the Mexicans it was something to talk about at work tomorrow, but not important
in the day-to-day scheme of surviving poverty and feeding the family.

Back down the years, someone had installed a roll bar in the Bronco, and the shooter was hanging on to it with his left hand,
smoking Marlboros with the other, knapsack between his feet on the floor and staying quiet. Danny moved along an arroyo in
four-wheel drive and suddenly there was Route 200. He stopped short of the highway, let Vito idle, and walked up on the road.
A federate
station sat just north of the airport. They were a mile north of the station, parked in a riverbed, with the traffic looking
normal along the highway. If there was a roadblock, which Danny guessed there was, it must have been closer in to the city,
probably at the
federate
outpost. The Bronco climbed up the riverbank, rolled over broken glass, and hit the pavement. Danny took it out of four-wheel
drive, and they headed toward
el Norte,
windows down and the breeze beginning to dry the sweat on Danny’s face and everywhere else.

Danny talked to the shooter without looking at him. “In about an hour I’d like to know which border town you want. If we’re
heading straight north toward Nogales, I’m going up a coast road for a while. It takes a little longer, but we’ll avoid some
of the heavy truck traffic around Tepic. Otherwise we’ll curl back southeast toward Guadalajara and catch the roads up to
Laredo or El Paso or Brownsville.”

The shooter’s flashlight bounced around as he studied the map. “According to what I’m seeing here, we don’t have to make the
decision that early. Looks like another east-west road further north. Comes out of Mazatlan and heads over to Durango.”

“Yeah, but it’s a horror story. Some guy once counted the curves between Mazatlan and Durango. Claims there’re thirty-three
hundred of’em. Also lots of falling rock up in those mountains, all kinds of small boulders lying on the highway, bandidos
on top of that. But it’s your nickel.”

The shooter said nothing. They blew up the middle of Bucerias and then past the turnoff to Punta de Mita, where Luz and Danny
used to swim naked at night and sometimes in the afternoons before Japanese fat cats started in on it with their fences and
bulldozers and condo blueprints.

A little farther north, Luz poked him in the shoulder and shouted over the wind, “Guamúchil.” Danny nodded and thought of
the little village off in the jungle. A woman in Guamúchil made tortillas the old way, by hand, rice-paper thin and filled
with hot salsa. She cooked them on the top of an oil drum cut out and laid over a circle of rocks with a fire underneath.
Luz and Danny had gone there once, bought a handful of the tortillas, and walked through the jungle, eating them and sucking
on wild limes. Danny had wanted to see a boa constrictor, but they hadn’t found any. Boas are hard to get a fix on, that’s
what someone told him. “You have to know their habits and watch the overhead branches.

An hour later Danny pulled off the road a kilometer south of Las Varas. They sat there in darkness, big stars on the other
side of the windshield, Vito idling like a slow coffee grinder with teeth missing. He turned the ignition key. Dead quiet
except for crickets in the background and the riffle of night breeze around them.

“Which way?”

The shooter was looking at the map again, using his little flashlight. He folded the map, stuck it under the seat, and lit
a cigarette. “Let’s hold off on the choice for a while. Take that coast road you were talking about, the one with less traffic.
We’ll talk routes again at Mazatlan. I might want to head up to Sonoyta.”

“Where the hell is that?” Danny had never heard of Sonoyta.

“Stay on Fifteen up to Santa Ana, just like you’re going to Nogales. At Santa Ana, take Route Two west… goes right up to Sonoyta.”

“What’s the U.S. border town there?”

“Isn’t any. Ajo, Arizona, is a little north of the border, Gila Bend’s another forty miles past Ajo.”

“That’s a long way from Dallas, if Dallas is where you’re headed.”

“Sonoyta, maybe.” That’s all he said.

Danny started the Bronco, turned left in Las Varas, and took the three of them northwest through the warm Mexican night. He’d
hung a radio off the dashboard a year ago and flipped it on now; song he’d heard before was playing. Luz had told him it was
based on an old Nahua poem from the days of the Conquistadors:

Nothing remains but flowers and sad songs Where once there were warriors and wise men… .

The shooter looked out Vito’s right side, into darkness. He looked that way for a long time, then put a worn desert boot up
on the dash and slouched in his seat, ball cap pulled even lower than before, as if he were sleeping. But Danny was pretty
sure he wasn’t.

R
ecoil. Counterpoint. As Danny Pastor shifted the Bronco into third gear, running toward
el Norte
through the blanket-soft night of coastal Mexico, a Learjet 35 climbed out of Andrews Air Force Base through light rain and
headed toward cruising altitude. Walter McGrane loosened his seat belt, pulled up the cuff of his safari jacket, and checked
his watch: Puerto Vallarta by dawn. He settled back and studied the two men in the club seats opposite him. A never-ending
line of them as the years went by, young and hard and confident. Always the same, young and hard and confident, while Walter
McGrane just got older. Dressed in jeans and windbreakers, on temporary reassignment from a special ops branch of the army,
they drank coffee and talked a language made obscure and privileged by the acronyms of their trade.

Packed in two black duffels lying in the narrow aisle were the tools of that trade. The long guns: M-40A1 sniper rifle fitted
with a 10X Unertl telescopic sight; M16A2 high-capacity assault weapon; Remington pump shotgun, full-choked and with seven
inches cut from the barrel for close-in work. The sidearms: Smith & Wesson .40-caliber automatics.

Each had a webbed vest with extra clips for the assault weapon and thirty rounds of match-grade hollowpoint ammunition for
the sniper rifle, a handheld radio, minibinoculars, compass, canteen, extra pistol magazines, penlight with filter, Mace,
camouflage paste, first-aid kit, plastic arm/leg restraints, notebook and pen, a clip-on thermometer for monitoring temperature
changes and compensating for their effect on bullet trajectories. Those things, other things, neatly arranged in the vest
pockets.

The Lear bucked once, then again, and the men across from Walter McGrane held Styrofoam cups away from their laps, letting
coffee slosh over the rims and onto the cabin floor. When the plane had cleared the turbulence and leveled off, McGrane opened
his briefcase and unfolded one of several detailed maps of Mexico he’d been given at his briefing two hours ago. Son of a
bitch, this would have to happen the day before his thirty-second wedding anniversary. Not that he cared much about anniversaries
of any kind, but his wife did, and he’d have fires to put out at home for the next six months and be reminded the following
year of how he’d missed the last anniversary. All because of Clayton Price.

As with all wars, Vietnam had produced its share of crazies, and now Clayton Price, a.k.a. Peter Schumann and other handles,
had become one of those who’d apparently gone over to rogue. Never would have guessed it, that’s what had been said at the
briefing. Never would have guessed it about Clayton Price, but then they were all time bombs, particularly the sniper teams—the
years of training to kill, and the killing itself, the flattened value structures and suppressed emotions necessary to carry
out their work. Some could be flat and cold for only so long, living as they did with the recollections of blood and brain
shots clearly monitored down the long lens of a twenty-power spotting scope.

Walter McGrane studied the map and wondered which way Clayton Price would run. North probably. Or maybe he’d bolt for the
jungles of Central America. Price understood jungles as well as anyone and far better than most. He’d been one of the best
shooters who’d ever worked for them, one of the best who’d ever lived, strange and distant, with more patience than a boulder.
That’s why he’d been called “Tortoise” in his Vietnam years, slow and methodical and patient. Somebody once said if Clayton
Price slowed down any more, he’d be moving backward. That is, until the right moment came and he instantly evolved into something
more like a snake. Reptilian, in any case, whether he was waiting or striking.

That’s what was said about Clayton Price when he was young and fast. But it was generally agreed now that he was getting old,
too old and out-of-date, thinking too much and asking questions about things he didn’t need to know, losing his edge. The
Covert Operations Unit had stopped using him five years ago except in certain circumstances where an extra hand was needed.

Old and out-of-date. Out of round. Out of step and style, out of order and out of tune. Clayton Price— Tortoise—and Nightingale
and Centipede and Broadleaf, a few others. The shadowmen, operating in the information penumbra cast by governments when moments
of secrecy are required and things need to be accomplished without the rest of the world knowing about them. Well, scratch
Centipede. He’d never made it out of some godforsaken Middle Eastern place last year—South Yemen, the rumors said—land mine
or gunned down by laser-controlled Gatling as he cut his way through concertina wire. Whatever got him, it was something metallic
and forever and final. That’s what Clayton Price had heard. And political repercussions afterward; that’s what Walter McGrane
knew for sure.