Puerto Vallarta Squeeze (8 page)

The shooter smiled. “No tourist card; only figured on being there a day or two.”

Luz was staring at the shooter in wonderment and wide in the eyes, looking over at Danny between stares. Danny wasn’t surprised
she was surprised. Here was a guy who didn’t like airplanes or traveler’s checks or credit cards or, for God’s sake, tourist
documents handed out routinely and generally without question. On the other hand, the odds of having your papers checked in
a tourist town were just about zero unless you did something really stupid. If Luz had known what Danny knew, it would all
make sense, but she didn’t.

Danny pushed it, wanted to see what his plans were. “How the hell are you going to get across the border?

That’s the first thing they want to see, especially at an out-of-the-way place like Sonoyta or whatever it’s called.”

“I’ll work it out. Turn myself into a stone, have you catapult me over, something like that.”

Danny thought, Now he’s getting occult on me, runelike. The shooter was grinning, in kind of a viperish way, it seemed to
Danny, while he ordered another Pacifico. Luz was still looking, first at the shooter, then at Danny, wondering about the
ways of gringo men she’d known and marveling for about the zillionth time at their total concentration on being self-destructive.

The shooter added a postscript. “Don’t worry about it; I’ll figure something out. It’s not your problem. Just get me within
walking distance of the border and we’ll consider it done. I understand
mordida”
—the bite— “works pretty well, a few bucks in a border official’s hand, that sort of thing. If that fails, you can take me
to one of the major crossing points and I’ll slide through at rush hour.”

He was right. That’d probably work, unless the border cops were looking for someone in particular, someone trying to get back
to the United States fast.

Danny and the shooter ordered the fish special for dinner. Luz went for broiled shrimp in garlic butter. The sound system
was playing American Dixieland jazz, out of keeping with the surroundings and some frail and failed attempt at pleasing gringos,
making them feel like they weren’t really too far from home. Danny listened to a nice trumpet solo on “Summertime” and ate
his fish and brown rice, glancing up now and then at the shooter, who was asking Luz about her life. She was pleased he’d
asked; that much was clear.

She told him what Danny already knew, leaving out certain and significant parts, of course, and finished up by saying, “Danny
came in the restaurant where I was working, one night. I liked him right away; he was more polite than most of the men. I
remember he was going to order enchiladas, but I told him the chiles rellenos were better, that we had big chiles and big
chiles are very good.” She smiled at Danny, but the shooter didn’t seem to be picking up on it, that chiles play a central
role in Mexican sexual humor. To be a man and have a big chili is considered a good thing. Danny rolled his eyes and looked
out the window.

The Dixieland band moved into “Muskrat Ramble.” From the small aviary in the hotel courtyard, parrots took up where the trombone
left off: shufflin’… shufflin…
arrrk!

Mosquitoes whined on the other side of the screen next to Danny, looking in at his face and neck: “Psst! Hey, you… gringo
guy… come outside for just a little while, gringo.” One of the cooks was laughing somewhere back in the kitchen, and the overhead
fan turned slowly, reminding Danny of a boozy old song they used to sing about one of the early hangouts in Puerto Vallarta:

Layin’ around the Oceana,

Overhead fans and no hot water.

Drinkin’ tequila and teasing the girls,

Hustlin’ a fisherman’s daughter.

Luz was telling the shooter how much she wanted to live in the United States someday. He listened attentively, nodding from
time to time, but didn’t say anything.

The light was fading fast, almost gone.

F
our horses and a colt slumbered along Juárez, taking their time. Danny Pastor waited for them to move over, shifted up through
the gears, and headed toward the outskirts of San Bias. There he turned east on a road that would take them up to Route 15,
the main north-south highway in western Mexico. It was a good morning, mist coming off ponds and rivers and colored amberish
by early light. A good morning, a full, bright morning in May, soft and warm and making it seem as if everything might turn
out all right.

Still, Danny was impatient and the opposite of that, all at the same time, flopping around somewhere in the middle ambiguities.
In his thoughtful moments he considered what would happen if they were stopped by one or another police outfit, trying to
think what he might say about a passenger who carried no tourist card. Ordinarily that could be worked out with
mordida,
but it was hard to say what level of interest in gringos of all kinds had been generated by the killings in Puerto Vallarta.
Maybe none at all, maybe a lot, maybe it was just being treated as a local problem. The conservative Danny was inclined to
head for the border, fast. The other Danny knew he should take his time, get to know the shooter inside out, needed to do
that if the story was going to be all it could be.

The shooter had put on dark green sunglasses and his ball cap, drinking coffee from a paper cup. He was wearing the same clothes
as the night before, still reasonably pressed, in spite of the heat and humidity. His eyes were better this morning, not as
tired. Danny, wearing green cotton shorts and an old, multiwrinkled ecru shirt with a plain collar, felt rumpled and disorderly
compared with the shooter, who had an air of military about him, of neatness and slow, deliberate precision.

Luz was rested and showed it, smiling, bouncing along in her little space behind the shooter and Danny. She pointed at a long-tailed
blue magpie jay flying through the trees to their right, morning light showing for an instant through the translucent blue
of the bird’s tail and wings. What could be better for her? Nothing. A pleasant morning and headed for
el Norte,
where she’d always wanted to go.

Two bobwhite quail scurried across the highway, running on short, quick legs, then lifted off and flickered into the Guaycoyul
palms. Red-flowered trees, yellow-flowered trees. The shooter asked Luz about the red ones, and she replied,
“Tabachin,
Mexican bird of paradise.”

They climbed east over the low coastal mountains and could see the Sierra Madre rising up fifty miles ahead of them, across
a big valley, and the peaks looking light purple in the haze. Curves and hills, villages waking up, donkey carts and men on
horseback driving cattle, schoolchildren walking along the road. Close-up smoke from cooking fires, distant smoke from slash-and-burn
farming where hillsides were being cleared. Man along the highway with the two items most common to men walking along rural
highways in Mexico: old brown dog and a machete. It was at least eighty and climbing fast. Danny was guessing at something
over a hundred later on. Soft morning, flamenco afternoon.

The Bronco called Vito rolled north through an invisible communications web becoming more intricately dense by the hour, a
humming meshwork of unseen words and orders reaching out with the single purpose of finding a man known as Tortoise. After
refueling in San Antonio, the Learjet out of Andrews had landed in Puerto Vallarta twenty-four hours ago. As instructed by
the tower, the plane had been parked near a row of Mexican military aircraft at the edge of the airport. Walter McGrane and
his compadres were picked up by a white Dodge van and taken away without passing through immigration or customs. Two hours
later, heavily armed men had begun spreading out from various posts in Mexico, covering airports and bus terminals and railroad
stations, riding through the countryside in trucks and vans. All of them on the watch for a man who’d cut down two people
in Puerto Vallarta. And all of them had the same instructions: If Clayton Price was spotted, report in, but
do not engage.
Repeat:
Do not engage.

Walter McGrane sat near the roar of a window air conditioner in the Puerto Vallarta police station, drinking coffee and trying
to guess which way Clayton Price was headed. Weatherford and the other man were in the next room, speaking Spanish to each
other, monitoring reports from the field. Nothing, so far. But something would turn up. It always did. And when it did, they
would find Clayton Price and kill him and go home.

The shooter hadn’t said anything since they’d left the Las Brisas, as if he were thinking hard and deep, though twice he’d
turned to glance at Luz. At a little past nine they hit Route 15. Danny turned left with America-the-beautiful three days
north of them. A Pemex station came up, and Danny filled both the front and rear tanks of the Bronco, put in a quart of oil.
The attendant had tried the old gas-pump trick, neglecting to ratchet the dial back to zero before he stuck the nozzle in
the Bronco. Danny’d caught him at it, put his hand on the attendant’s arm, and pointed at the gauge. The attendant had merely
shrugged, as if he’d forgotten that nicety in the process of providing good, fast service.

Little villages rolled by, some of them near the road, some a half mile or so on either side, hot and dirty and rough as hell.
Ragged wash on clotheslines, brown dogs asleep in the shade, burros wandering around.

“Damn, that’s tough living,” Danny said, trying to make conversation. “Those places are pits.”

The shooter looked and said nothing. He’d seen dusty little villages all over the world and had squatted in them and had eaten
with his right hand when the villagers had something to spare. He’d always paid for what he’d eaten, unless it was the village
custom to make travelers comfortable and where payment would be an insult. He’d eaten monkey and snake and bird and dog and
croc and things in brown stew that floated greasy and fat, wondering if the greasy fat things also wondered about what their
happy life had come to. Stew had a way of abolishing identity, mercifully so.

Passing by Santa Penita, an especially bad-looking potpourri of houses and dirt streets, Danny shook his head, glad he wasn’t
living there in heat and dust. No matter where he was headed, it would never come to that.

“I grew up in a village just like that one, lived in a house just like those, went to a little adobe school like the one we
just went by.” Luz was kneeling between them, looking out the windshield. “Danny, it’s unkind to say and think such things.
These are poor people; life is very hard for them.”

She’d heard it before—gringo superiority, tourists open-mouthed and aghast at how the po’ folks live and why doesn’t somebody
do something about it, and what happens to all that foreign aid we send? That sort of bullshit clucking.

Danny turned to her. “You’re right. Sorry.”

The shooter was thinking along the same lines. “Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, you know. Americans born into luxury’s
cradle, then escaping it by running down here looking for meaning because all the crap we buy somehow doesn’t cut it for us.
And while we’re looking, we’re bitching about the sanitation setup of a destitute Mexican village. Ever strike you we’re nuttier
than hell, Danny Pastor?”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. Along with that, I remember the writer Carlos Fuentes saying all gringos look alike to Mexicans
and our language sounds like Chinese to them.”

The talk about place had given Danny an opening. “Where you from, originally?” He pretended to concentrate on driving, giving
the impression he wasn’t all that interested.

“Brooklyn, Seventh Avenue. Area called Park Slope.”

“You grow up there?” Danny had a deep-down sense the quiet man was in a mood to talk.

“Partly. My father pulled out when I was ten.” The shooter looked over at him, a kind of dark rain moving across his face.

He was calling up old images, bad things that happened. His voice took on that color and sounded distant, maybe lonely, maybe
all of that and something more. For a moment Danny thought the conversation was over, but the shooter went on. “Don’t know
why he left. Never did understand it. Just left. My mother couldn’t take care of both of us, so she sent me off to live with
her mother and father in northern Minnesota. The ol’ man drank a lot. My grandmother was pretty nice, but they were in their
seventies by that time. Not ready to take up being parents again.”