Puerto Vallarta Squeeze (20 page)

It took Danny the rest of the afternoon to install the new pump. By the time he finished, he was hot and greasy and generally
out of sorts. Luz and the shooter looked fresh after their baths and stood around watching while Danny swore and turned wrenches,
finally getting it done and slamming the hood afterward. He started the engine, which still sounded rough and noisy but no
worse than it ever had. The three of them took a trial spin around the village, then up on the highway. Fifteen minutes later
they returned and Danny said the Bronco would take them onward to wherever the hell it was they were going.

Leave tomorrow morning, then?

No. Luz wanted to celebrate the Feast of the Madonna with the villagers, and the shooter had agreed to that.

“Are you serious?” Danny said, and then described what he’d seen at Concordia, a small army including gringo cops of some
kind, and what the hell did the shooter think of that.

“I’m not surprised. I expected it.”

“Do they know who you are?”

“Maybe. Depends on who’s talked to whom. This operations been a little too open right from the start.”

“I mean, do they know what you look like?”

“Maybe. The military and other branches of the government have records, keep track of those people who’ve done work for them.
Each of us in this business has a certain style—trademarks—no matter how much we try not to have them.”

The shooter didn’t say anything else except they’d lay low tomorrow and think about pulling out on Monday. Danny recalled
what the shooter had said about the Las Noches crowd and their kamikaze lifestyles, and decided about then the shooter had
joined them, maybe Luz as well, taking Danny Pastor along as an unwilling accomplice. Danny tried for a moment to think about
death wishes but got overpowered by the concept and let it go.

They had dinner about nine o’clock, and Danny stumbled off to bed, so tired he had trouble going to sleep. Through the window
he could see lightning farther back in the eastern mountains. Luz and the shooter were quietly talking somewhere outside,
on the balcony. But he couldn’t make out what they were saying. During the night, Danny awakened, chilly and almost shivering.
He rolled over to snuggle up against Luz, but she wasn’t there. He was too tired to think about it just then and went back
to sleep.

Danny got up shortly after dawn. Luz’s side of the bed was still empty, and he stood there contemplating the un-wrinkled sheets
for a few seconds, trying to figure out what lay in that emptiness. The wind came up, and a soft rain began falling through
thin, yellow sunlight. The trees bent, and there was rain across the valleys, and he could see it falling upon the tile roofs
and upon the dirt roads and the cobblestone streets of Zapata. And it ran down the tiles and onto the cobblestones and along
the streets and moved downward toward the valleys in the way that water goes. Outside his window was a peacock tree, red blossoms
wet and dripping. But the serious rains were still several weeks yet to come, and the shower degenerated into a slow drizzle
after a few minutes.

By the time he was dressed, the wind and rain had gone completely, mist rising from the valleys. The cantina owner had shown
them how to make their own coffee in case no one was tending things early in the morning, which there never was. The pot was
half full and still passably warm. He poured a cup and strolled outside. People were already up and moving along the wet streets,
carrying flowers and headed in the direction of the little cemetery on the northwest edge of the village. After a while the
shooter and Luz came walking from that direction. They’d been up to the cemetery, where Luz had said a prayer for her own
mother and both of them sheltering beneath a tree until the rain had passed.

Did Danny want to go to mass with them?

What?… Mass, for chrissake?

He could imagine the shooter kneeling down and making sure the Beretta didn’t show when his pant leg hiked up. But they were
serious, and Luz said later Clayton Price had taken off his gun and left it in his room when they went to mass.

Church bells on a Sunday morning, and the faithful gathered in front of the church, nodding and greeting each other before
going inside. Danny sat on the cantina porch and drank coffee, visions of small armies assembling and moving all around them,
road by road, village by village.

Across the plaza he could see the shooter and Luz entering the church, Luz wearing a little straw hat with a black ribbon
around the crown and a light yellow dress hemmed just above her knees. The hat had come from a store down the street. A village
woman had made the dress for her, working all Saturday afternoon and into the evening to finish it since the shooter had promised
double her normal price.

After a while Danny walked over to the main door of the church and looked in. The priest was holding up a chalice, saying
words. The faithful said words back to him. Behind the priest was a huge cross. Crepuscular light slanted through stained-glass
windows, coloring orange a suffering Jesús, hanging, crucified. Men die for a variety of reasons, their own or somebody else’s.

Luz and the shooter were about halfway up on the right side, standing with the rest of the villagers. She reached out and
hooked her arm around one of his. Jesús-on-the-cross-above-’em, Danny thought; they looked like the young lovers he’d seen
lollygagging around the plaza in the blue, mountain evenings. And he tried again to think about just what the hell kinds of
interpersonal transitions were happening and what the hell they were still hanging around Zapata for. And, most of all, why
was Danny Pastor still hanging around? Fear, maybe. Something else, maybe. Maybe some kind of allegiance to Luz or, God help
him, to Clayton Price and seeing through a bargain to the end.

When the mass ended, the priest stood at the church door with his acolytes and shook hands with the parishioners as they left.
He smiled and spoke to Luz and the shooter. Danny watched him take the hand of Clayton Price and wondered if the slightest
trace of cordite might linger on the priest’s hand and if he would smell it later on.

The cantina owner had told Luz and the shooter about an old Spanish church outside of town, one of many places in Mexico called
Guadalupe. A field trip had been planned for later that afternoon. Danny was wallowing in total disbelief by this time and
began feeling more than a little mutinous. Mass… Luz and the shooter with arms joined… a field trip—this was dementia, “super-nuts,”
as he’d once heard an old physicist say in Las Noches. The physicist had been a member of the Los Alamos team that developed
the first workable A-bomb.

Danny had never known what super-nuts felt like until that afternoon, driving out of Zapata on a field trip with the warriors
of springtime surely closing in around them. All they needed was a wicker basket filled with picnic goodies and lemonade,
but they didn’t have one. Though, if Luz had thought about it ahead of time, the shooter would have found a wicker basket
for her somewhere, maybe had it overnighted from L. L. Bean along with snorkeling equipment and rock-climbing gear.

The directions to this local Guadalupe were a little vague but workable: Go up on the highway, take the road to Ponuco when
you see the sign, drive about six miles northeast along a dirt road hacked out of the mountainside—a road full of good-size
rocks and barely wide enough for one vehicle—pull off the road when you come to a river, follow the river upstream on foot.

When they’d talked to the cantina owner and reconfirmed the directions to Guadalupe, Luz had overheard two hombres in the
bar talking about all the soldiers in Concordia. They’d said a massive manhunt was going on all over Mexico for someone who
had killed two men in Puerto Vallarta and that the bodies of three
federates
had been found at the Pemex station south of Mazatlán, so the search was being concentrated in this general area. She’d looked
worried when she’d told the shooter and Danny what she’d heard. Danny was worried, too, but Clayton Price hadn’t said anything,
just chewed on his lower lip slightly while she talked.

It took them thirty minutes to work six miles back into the mountains. High up they went, thousand-foot drop-offs on the outer
edge of the road. Vito climbed, and climbed more, then began a long descent into a deep valley where the river flowed. A Jeep,
one of the flashy Baja models loaded with automotive trinkets and decorated with intricate striping, damn near ran them off
the road on a blind curve. It looked expensive and new, with a long antenna waving from the rear of it and carrying four Mexican
teenagers with bottles of beer in their hands.

“Pretty fancy Jeep,” the shooter said. “How can someone in these villages afford something like that?”

“Drugs,” Danny replied. “There’s marijuana grown in commercial quantities all over the backcountry here. Lately the government’s
been carrying out one of its periodic crackdowns on drugs, so the dope growers have turned to robbery. That’s the main reason
for the increase in bandido activity along the main highways. The dope farmers have forgotten how to do any other kind of
farming, or don’t want to do it.”

They reached the river and parked off the road on a dry portion of the riverbed. Luz still had on her yellow dress and hat,
even though this was jeans-and-boots terrain. Her sandals were slippery on the river stones, so she took them off and hopped
from flat rock to flat rock. Danny noticed how good her legs looked when she jumped from one rock to another, the yellow dress
fluffing up.

They had to cross the river twice when it turned and cut them off at bluff outcroppings jutting out to the water’s edge. The
shooter and Danny crossed on rocks. Luz did the same on the first crossing. On the second the rocks were too far apart for
her. The shooter walked back and picked her up, sloshing through the water while she held her sandals in one hand and laughed
and wiggled her toes, the dress sliding high up to the tops of her thighs. Danny was starting to feel left out of things.
It seemed Luz and the shooter were reaching an understanding at some pretty basic levels. Also, given the fact people were
looking for them, there was some kind of psychological denial going on here, only Danny wasn’t tuned in to it. They walked
along a dirt path toward an old suspension bridge across the river, Luz humming and the shooter grinning like a schoolboy.

After thirty minutes of walking and jumping and finally crossing to the other side one more time via a dilapidated suspension
bridge, they reached the old church. Though it was hard for Danny to concentrate, thinking as he was about the crunch they
were in, he had to admit there was something special about wandering around the remains of a five-hundred-year-old Spanish
church in the outback. The church had been built to serve a large mining operation, and the original flumes and sluices and
stone structures where water wheels turned were still in place, made of river stone and looking capable of standing for another
five hundred years. The roof on the church was gone, but the walls were still in place, and their voices echoed in there.

“Hola.”
The three of them swung around to see an old man coming into the church, dog with him. All of them said hello back to him.
The old man said he was known as Don José Fierro and called himself the “Guardian of Guadalupe,” a self-appointed position,
Danny guessed. The old man was proud of his church and proud of his job, self-made though it was, showing them around and
fetching an old newspaper clipping with a picture of him standing in the middle of the church. It had originally been published
in a Mazatlán tourist newspaper. He pointed out details of the place, took them on a tour of the entire area and then back
to the church, where he showed them a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe encased in, plastic and hanging on a wall where the
altar used to be.

They left twenty pesos with him and walked back toward the Bronco. Rounding a bend in the riverbed, they saw a man looking
into the Bronco. The shooter went tight and into a half crouch, but Luz said it was only a curious farmer, and the tension
eased. The farmer was embarrassed they’d caught him snooping, but Danny said,
“Buenas tardes,”
pleasantly, and the farmer seemed to feel a little better, waving and smiling as he drifted away.

Coming back into Zapata, the shooter instructed Danny to park the Bronco out of sight in a shallow arroyo behind where they
were staying. Danny didn’t ask why. They went to the cantina porch and sat there, evening drinks, evening talk.

The village hombres were getting an early start on the main fiesta celebration scheduled to begin at nine o’clock, two hours
away. A couple of pickups were parked on the east side of the plaza, hoods lined with empty beer cans and the hombres lounging
around the trucks. Suddenly a police car came up the street and turned into the plaza area.

“Stay put,” the shooter said, watching the car. “If we move they’ll notice it. Maybe they’re just here to keep an eye on the
boy-os, hold things in check on fiesta night.”

The black-and-white moved slowly around the plaza, past the pickups. One of the hombres held out a beer to the cop on the
passenger side, but the cop laughed and waved him off.

When they came around to where Danny, Luz, and the shooter were sitting, the car slowed and stopped.

“Buenas tardes,”
Danny said in his best holiday fashion, looking up at the late sun and guessing it was still
tardes.

The passenger-side cop said the same thing back and grinned. “Are you here for the fiesta?” he asked in surprisingly decent
English.

“Yes, it should be a good time.” Danny gestured toward Luz and the shooter. “My friend already has a pretty woman to dance
with. Will anybody mind if I dance with the senoritas?”

The cop laughed and looked hard at the shooter, looked at him in a pointed way, as if he were comparing a face he’d seen in
a photograph to the one before him. He tried to be casual about it, but wasn’t very smooth, and it was noticeable.