Puerto Vallarta Squeeze Read online

  “Good, you’ve got it. Now remember it,” he said quietly. “Next, what’s up ahead? The map says there’s a town called Concordia.”

  Danny hesitated for a moment. The shooter was looking out the windshield and spoke without turning. “I’ll say it again: Stop thinking whatever you’re thinking—I gpt out of this, the two of you get out. It’s not any more complicated than that. What am I gping to have to deal with down the road?”

  “East of Concordia there’s an agricultural inspection station where they look for infected products. I remember it because of one thing: last time I came through, there were several men at the station, one of ’em was sitting in an office chair outside the kiosk, tilted back in the chair and holding some kind of mean-looking gun across his lap. I remember the office chair and the gun, particularly the gun. I thought that level of firepower was a little heavy-handed for an agricultural inspection station. Usually they just wave gringos on through, but they stopped me and poked around in my VW”

  “When was that?”

  “A little over three years ago. I think it was the old VW bus, why they looked me over. They associate those things with hippies and dopers.”

  “Long time. Things change, You remember anything about what type of gun the guy had?”

  “I don’t know, honestly. Had one of those curved clips attached to it. I guess they call ’em assault rifles.”

  “AK-47, probably. Who knows what’s there now… something. If they were armed then, they’re probably still armed. What’s after that?”

  “The mountains. Small villages along the way. Not all that much till Durango.”

  “How far to Durango?”

  “Maybe a hundred fifty miles. Long haul, though, like I said before.”

  His nod was almost imperceptible. “We’ve got to get cleaned up before we go through that inspection station up ahead. We look like something that ought to be looked over carefully. Next creek we come to, turn off the road and drive up the creek out of sight.”

  Danny could see a cathedral spire slightly off to his left, five miles away. That’d be Concordia. The spire ascended through early evening light, soft light shining on the Sierra Madre wall forty miles straight ahead of them.

  The shooter had a sense about things, and a creek came up a mile farther on, running shallow across the road. Danny did as he’d been told, checked to make sure no one was coming in either direction, and turned off the highway, following the water upstream. The creek was shallow with a rocky bottom, so he didn’t bother with four-wheel drive. A quarter mile north the creek made a bend. Danny went around it and stopped when they were hidden from the road. The creek was in shadow there, cows grazing in a nearby pasture. Turkey vultures were perched in a tree upstream from them, a more obvious and pregnant symbolism than Danny cared to think about then or even later on.

  As the shooter slid out of the Bronco, he looked at Luz and Danny, smiling a little. “In dry country, the path of flight which small birds take in the late afternoon usually leads to water… old survival rule.”

  The shooter took his denim shirt out of his knapsack along with rolled-up khaki pants, what he’d been wearing in El Niño when Danny had first seen him. He started for the water, then stopped and looked back to where Luz and Danny were still sitting in the Bronco, muddled and immobilized.

  “Clean up. Both of you. We’re going to look presentable when we hit that inspection station.”

  The shooter removed his shoes, shirt, and trousers, unfastened his leg holster and laid it on his clothing along with the sheathed knife. He was standing there in pale blue boxer shorts, his skin pale, too, except for his face and arms, a farmer’s tan. And Danny noticed again the big, mean scars on his back and chest and thighs.

  Danny pulled his duffel out and helped Luz get down from the Bronco with her cloth shoulder bag, which was more like a large purse. She was a mess, streaks of dirt on her face, dirt in her hair, on her clothes.

  The shooter bent over and began to splash water on his face and chest, arms and legs. Danny waded into the creek a few yards above him, balancing himself against the poke of sharp rocks on his feet, and copied what the shooter was doing.

  Luz went downstream a little and took off her clothes. She wasn’t particularly modest, never had been once she’d arrived at a certain point in her freedom, but not too much the other way, either. She stripped down to her underwear, pinned up her hair, and began slowly washing herself. After a while, she turned her back to the men and took off her bra and panties. In a place where the water deepened to six inches and ran smooth over gray sand, she lay down, resting on her elbows, the top third of her breasts showing above the water. The water ran around her breasts and over her belly and legs.

  She lay there for perhaps thirty seconds before sitting upright again, the shooter watching her as he finished washing himself. She must have felt that somehow and half turned toward the men, one breast in full view. Danny was surprised to see her smile, a small enigmatic smile, but with a curious warmth to it, curious because of the circumstances. She turned away again and sat there, washing the dirty clothes she’d taken off.

  Danny worked on the incongruity of it all: the gun, the killing, the fer-de-lance in the water near him, and the soft, brown woman who gently washed her body and clothing in a shadowed creek, on a warm evening in Mexico.

  While the shooter dressed, he said, “Let’s stop playing this shell game. “You saw me do the hit in Puerto Vallarta, didn’t you?”

  Danny stammered around a little, finally saying yes.

  “I thought so. When I walked out of there I saw you watching me. It was no accident I drifted into that little bar where you were drinking tequila later on. After I left El Niño, I hid in a doorway on Calle Aldama. I wanted to get the hell out of there, but I also didn’t want to take a chance on leaving you behind all full of tequila and talkative when the cops came. It was a tough decision, whether to wait for you or not. I gave myself three minutes, after which I’d have been gone. When you and Luz left, I followed you.”

  A chill raced up Danny’s spine, bounced off some higher place above him, and came back down along its original track.

  “You were after me, for God’s sake?”

  “Yes. I was waiting for the right street, somewhere quiet and dark.”

  “Were you going to kill both of us?”

  “I wouldn’t have had any choice.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Well, sometimes I’m not very good at this, not anymore. In spite of what you may think, I’m not as hard as I once was. For some reason I’ve been fading a little as I get older. Ten years ago you’d both have been lying on the pavement in Puerto Vallarta.” He was talking matter-of-factly, cold and flat, stating facts, not bragging. “Frankly, I looked at Luz sitting in… whatever that little bar is called, in her lavender dress, looking young and pretty and eating an ice cream, and couldn’t bring myself to do it. You, I didn’t care about, still don’t if you’re wondering.”

  Danny wasn’t wondering and had no doubts whatsoever about where he stood in the overall picture.

  “Then I got the idea of having you drive me to the border. The boat that was supposed to pick me up had been delayed, the usual foul-up, so I needed to get out of Puerto Vallarta anyway. Having you take me, I could keep an eye on you for a few days while the cops were running all over everywhere and find out at the same time if you d seen anything in El Niño. That done, I’d have been over the border and a long way from here. If it came to it, I was going to take you down and just scare hell out of Luz, guessing she’d never say anything.”

  “Is that still an open course of action?”

  “Depends on you, gringo.”

  “If I’d said I wouldn’t take you to the border, what would have happened?”

  The hard smile Danny had seen before came at him again. The shooter didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.

  Two hours before full dark, they left the creek and got on the ro
ad again. Luz was wearing a red blouse and clean jeans. Danny was in jeans and a plain gray T-shirt. The shooter had put on his photographer’s vest over the denim shirt.

  Danny took them through the edge of Concordia, took them slow, not wanting to swivel any attention their way. Dust of the day going down, kids playing, men sitting in roadside restaurants while women laughed and cooked chicken over wood fires, smoke rising and blowing off on the evening breeze. They rolled past roadside stands where handmade furniture was for sale, craftsmen making it and selling in open-air shops, working under thatched roofs supported by poles.

  Luz was on her knees, balancing herself with one hand on each of the two front seats. As they went by the furniture shops, she spoke quietly. “It is every village woman’s dream to own one of those fine beds in which she can lie and conceive and give birth.”

  To Danny, her words and the way in which she’d said them seemed a curious thing at that very moment. A kind of peasant’s lamentation with undercurrents, as if she were thinking of other routes she might have taken, as if she were grieving for the structure and traditions she’d abandoned when she left her village. Danny had always known there was a part of Luz that was still a campesina—a country girl— a good Catholic girl. It surfaced occasionally, and her speech turned almost nostalgic when it did.

  The shooter turned and looked at her, his face only a few inches from hers, and stared at her for a long moment. He nodded, as if he understood what lay beneath her words, smiling in a way that, for him, seemed uncommonly genuine and warm. Luz smiled back at him.

  “Inspection station’s up ahead,” Danny said.

  The shooter turned from Luz and studied the road, reaching in his knapsack and dropping an extra clip for the Beretta in his left vest pocket.

  “Roll up to it, easylike. Grin real wide and say, ’Buenas tardes.’ Keep rolling, though, as if you expect them to wave you right on through.” He glanced back at Luz. “If we’re stopped and things go bad, keep your head down.”

  Danny was wishing they were traveling in something a little more classy than the Bronco. Mexicans judged things by appearance, particularly people and what the people drove. And they were driving suspicious-looking junk.

  Fifty yards from the station Danny slowed the Bronco. Two men in uniforms were leaning against posts supporting an overhanging roof under which vehicles passed. A third was doing something behind the glass of the kiosk. The fourth and fifth men were armed. One had a revolver in a waist holster. The other carried a rifle similar to the one Danny remembered from his previous visit. Ugly gun, with a metal, hinged stock that was nothing more than a triangular bar, curved clip sticking out of the bottom of the rifle.

  The shooter was talking through lips that barely moved, flexing the fingers on his right hand as he spoke. “The rifle’s a Galil .308, holds twenty-five rounds, probably modified to be fully automatic… nasty little bastard. Wish I had it instead of him. Probably hasn’t been cleaned in two years.”

  For a moment Danny thought they were going to be waved through. Just as he was about to accelerate, the man wearing the pistol held up his hand, signaling for them to stop. The shooter was coming up to combat status; you could feel it, could almost hear his adrenaline escalating.

  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 th
irty 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.