Puerto Vallarta Squeeze

  Still, explaining why she couldn’t come along was going to be tough. For all she knew, the shooter was just some crazy gringo who didn’t like airplanes and had business in Dallas. If Danny told her about him, she’d know something she didn t need to know, something that could hurt her if the shooter found out or if the federates started asking her questions for whatever reason. The federates had ways of getting information when they wanted it, especially from a woman.

  On the other hand, if this was simply a delivery job to the border, there was no reason why she shouldn’t go. And if Danny said absolutely not, no way, she’d piss and moan and cry and maybe just take off somewhere, the way she threatened to do whenever they had a serious scrap. On top of that, she’d tell everyone they knew about this safari into the high North. It wouldn’t take overriding genius for someone to pull the shooting together with Danny leaving in the middle of the night accompanied by a strange gringo who had to get to the border fast and didn’t like airplanes. Even the policia could figure that one out.

  “It’s okay with me if she comes along.” The shooter studied the map while he talked, face thin and shadow-lit by the flashlight reflecting off the map. ’You drive, she handles food and water and communications problems or whatever, I watch the horizon for bandidos and other perils of the road. It’s a nice three-legged stool of mutual support.”

  “See, it all right with him if I go along.”

  Shit. Getting complicated, as if it weren’t already complicated enough. The shooter had practically invited her, and Danny had no way of explaining why she couldn’t come without taking her inside and whispering in her ear. In that case, she’d tear her hair and plead with Danny not to go. The sum of all these little pieces was the shooter would sense something was wrong and maybe do bad things to both of them.

  Danny gave it another try, a feeble one. “Luz, the Bronco has only two seats… no place for you to sit. The back’ll be filled with gear.” She’d worked that out already and said she could sit on the sleeping bag and stack the supplies around her.

  She went back up the stairs for the sleeping bag and three cans of Pennzoil stashed under the sink. The shooter had to use the bathroom and followed her inside. Somehow, in a way Danny couldn’t quite get hold of, the situation was taking on a life of its own. Things had a way of doing that when you hadn’t thought them through ahead of time. It was called the Qué Será, Será school of planning, the wrinkled blueprint for Danny’s life over the last few years when he’d decided, without deciding, to let the tropics have their way with him.

  Danny slammed the Bronco’s hood and watched Luz come out of the apartment building. She walked over to him, carrying a sleeping bag, a big flashlight, and a small duffel bag of clothes for Danny. An overweight couple stopped and asked how to find a bus out to the Sheraton. The woman, with blue curled hair underneath a beribboned straw beach hat, spoke with a grating nasality. Danny glanced at their name tags carrying a “Snap-On Tools” logo and suggested they walk down to Insurgentes and find a taxi, easier this time of night. They moved on, complaining to each other about bus service in Mexican towns.

  He checked the building’s doorway, no sign of the shooter, then spoke low and hard to Luz. “Don’t say anything about us being in El Niño tonight or about the shooting. Got that? Nothing I’ll explain later.” She nodded, obviously confused but trusting him and glad to be going along. The shooter came out of the building’s doorway, looking up and down the street as he walked.

  They closed up the apartment, piled in the Bronco, and backed onto Madero. Luz burrowed in behind Danny and the shooter, nesting in a melange of water jugs, cans of motor oil, and other gear.

  The shooter handed Danny twenty-five one-hundred-dollar bills.

  “That’s a lot of cash to be carrying around, particularly in Mexico.” Danny was shifting into second and rolling toward Insurgentes.

  The shooter took a navy blue ball cap from his knapsack, bent the bill into a half oval, and pulled it low over his eyes.

  “I have my quirks. I don’t like airplanes, and I don’t like traveler’s checks or credit cards.”

  Danny handed the money back to Luz. “Stick this way down inside the sleeping bag. If we get stopped by the federates or the judicial police, I’d prefer not to have my pockets bulging with American dinero.”

  He glanced at the shooter. “Aren’t you afraid of being rolled, carrying around that much cash?”

  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 no
ne 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.

  SHADOWMEN

  Recoil. 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.

  The radio Danny Pastor had slung from the dash kept on playing: warriors and wise men, flowers and sad songs, Mexican night rolling by. Luz María was awake, saying nothing. Clayton Price was awake and thinking about Centipede, about the time they’d gone into Ecuador as a team and taken out three revolutionaries who were using the drug trade to finance leftist efforts on behalf of a better world. That was damn near the end for both of them. If it hadn’t been for the gutsy pilot in the old C-47, it would have been the end. He’d landed on grassed-over asphalt and slowed only enough to let them run alongside and climb in the cargo door, as if they were hopping a freight. Tortoise and Centipede, tight-lipped at first, then laughing and giving each other a high-five when they’d made it over the Andes. Insertion was hard enough, extraction was where it always got real close. Like now, in Mexico.