Puerto Vallarta Squeeze (13 page)

What did anyone know so far? Danny ran the totals. In Puerto Vallarta, one man dead for sure and another wounded or dead.
Crazy gringo and his girlfriend took off in the middle of the night, headed for somewhere. Nothing too unusual there, since
crazy gringos did that sort of thing all the time. Three
federates
missing; the estuary fishermen might have heard the shots and maybe saw part or all of what happened on the bluff. If they
had, chances were they’d look the other way and wouldn’t report it, knowing they’d probably get in trouble of some kind just
for being good citizens. They’d talk about it among themselves, though, and word eventually would get to the law. But in spite
of what had occurred so far, the upside was nobody really had a fix on the three of them at the moment. Back to options, back
to survival. Where did that leave him and Luz?

The shooter took over, closing down the choice set. “Here’s the drill, padre. You get me to the border or otherwise out of
trouble, and I keep my mouth shut just like you’re going to do, now and forever after, no matter what happens. No stories
about this little adventure, Danny-the-sometime-writer, if that’s what you’re thinking. First Amendment rights have their
limits, and I’m the limit right now and as far as you can imagine into the future.

“And let me tell you something else: We’re not going to play the old movie game where I try to stay up nights and watch the
two of you. That’s the one where the bad guy eventually dozes off and everybody jumps him. This isn’t make-believe. I’ll sleep
when I have to sleep, You’ll do what you have to do. But if you’re going to do something, get it right the first time; there
won’t be a second chance. ’You saw what happened back there. I’m looking for salvage now, don’t care much about anything except
getting out of Mexico. Got it?”

Danny glanced over at him.
“Yes,
I’ve got it.” And he remembered again the wiseguys he’d dealt with back in Chicago. They were city tough and talked like
it, dressed like it in flashy clothes, behaved that way—the Vitos and Sals and Vinnies. The shooter was different somehow.
He seemed rather ordinary most of the time, quiet and pleasant, maybe lonely, almost pensive. But he could transform himself
instantly into something else, something shadowlike and feral, something swift and implacable. As if you’d stepped into a
dark room and were feeling your way through it, not seeing the fer-de-lance coiled on the mantel just at the level of your
jugular, watching and waiting for your neck to come within range. The man who seemed lonely and quiet had been tying his shoe
one moment, twenty seconds later three men who had stepped into a dark room on a sunlit road were dead.

“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 road 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.