Puerto Vallarta Squeeze

by Robert James Waller

  Click, and click again—the sniper rifle. Walter McGrane looked at the man called Weatherford and the other muscled windbreaker beside Weatherford. They were the new and improved versions of Clayton Price, routinely produced by special operations units in various branches of the military. Better trained, disciplined, more reliable, it was said, unlike the shadowmen, who were viewed by some as too individualistic, too eccentric, too likely to just take off and do things their own way. “Cowboys,” they were sometimes called, the word accompanied always by a derisive shake of the head. Still, others in the COU, Walter McGrane included, preferred the old way of working, using the shadowmen who left no paper trail of temporary assignments from the military, a set of specialized arrows that could be drawn from a quiverful of options when the time arose. The few who were left could be called on when the times got tough and the work got extremely dirty, “wet” in agency parlance, in Africa or the Middle East or Guatemala… or Mexico. True, they weren’t as disciplined as their newer versions. And, true, they tended to be eccentric. But they had their own strengths. Individualism and eccentricity always seemed to be the other side of the creative mind.

  The Lear’s engines shifted in pitch, and the co-pilot announced over the intercom they were beginning their descent into San Antonio for refueling. Weatherford looked over at Walter McGrane and grinned. “Just who is it we’re after, this time? All we were told was to gather up our gear and get over to Andrews.”

  “Man named Clayton Price.”

  “Don’t believe I’ve heard of him. That never matters, though, does it?”

  “It might this time,” said Walter McGrane.

  “Why’s that?”

  “He’s one of us. Going up against Clayton Price is like shooting pool with Pool itself.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means after you finish making love to that rifle, you might want to glance at the notes I prepared for you.”

  “Right, I’ll do that.”

  “Yes,” Walter McGrane said, “be sure and do that. And remind me to tell you sometime about what he went through in Vietnam, after his capture by the VC.”

  “Bad?”

  Walter McGrane looked Weatherford straight in the eyes and shook his head slowly back and forth, said nothing, and returned to studying his maps.

  GYPSY MUSIC

  Twenty minutes after turning west off Route 200, Danny got lost in Zacualtan, feeling ugly and incompetent about it. Not much of a town, but the streets all seemed to end in fields or at somebody’s front porch. He and Luz had driven this route once before on a weekend outing, and she remembered something about the plaza. Turn there, maybe. Danny drove back through town, made the turn, and three blocks later they were heading up the coast road, in open country again. The shooter was quiet, desert boot tapping slowly on the dashboard.

  This was backcountry rural, where anything might be wandering on or across the road. Animals, in particular, liked to lie on the warm pavement when the night cool settled in and sometimes shared that space with drunks. Danny held the Bronco back, which wasn’t hard since Vito complained and got out of sorts at anything exceeding fifty.

  Around three A.M., the pavement ended at a barricade of hundred-pound rocks painted white and marked with the words “NO PASEO.”

  Danny whacked the steering wheel. “Shit.”

  Nothing about a detour, nothing in the way of directions. When they’d come this way a couple of years back, there was no problem, pavement all the way. Rough, but passable then.

  Luz rescued them for the second time in forty-five minutes. “Danny, bus going through village.”

  “Where?”

  “Down hill, over there.”

  Danny looked down to his left and saw the lights of a bus moving at about three miles an hour, its headlights illuminating trees and houses. He retreated down the hill and took the Bronco into the village, figuring the bus-driver knew something they didn’t, something about a detour. Danny tried to guess where the bus had come through the narrow dirt streets winding into one another. He made a left turn at what he thought was a road and ended up in a creek bed, where the headlights startled roosting chickens and sleeping pigs. Finally he worked his way through the village, made the right choice at a Y intersection, and got back up on the main road. After a mile of fine dust blowing into the Bronco and covering everything inside with a kind of brownish red talcum powder, they passed two bulldozers sitting in the dark and hit hard surface again.

  They were moving along the edge of a high cliff dropping off toward the Pacific and could see the lights of Santa Cruz, and San Bias farther on, a long way to the north. Dawn coming up on the other side of the coastal mountains. Danny estimated they were an hour out of San Bias and drove carefully around curve after curve, with jungle on both sides of them and trees arching over the road, making a gray green tunnel through which the mad trio rolled at sunrise, all with their own oblique purposes.

  Luz was curled up in the back, sleeping, almost out of sight in the jumble of water jugs, food, and other gear. The daughter of Jesús and Esmeralda Santos could sleep anywhere at anytime in anything.

  The shooter lit another Marlboro, stretched, yawned.

  “What business you in, Mr. Schumann, if you don’t mind my asking?” Country-boy language, casual approach. Danny watched the road for serious potholes but was aware the shooter was looking at him for several seconds before answering.

  “Consulting, You could say I’m a freelance specialist in crisis management.” Suitably vague, but the hair on the back of Danny’s neck lifted up. He got hold of himself and pushed it a little further.

  “Any special area in which you work? Construction, oil, any of that?”

  “All of it. If there’s a mess, I clean up the trash, get rid of the garbage. It’s a dirty world, lot of messy accounts out there.”

  Danny was about to ask him what messy accounts had to be settled in Puerto Vallarta, just to see how he’d answer, but the shooter spoke first.

  “How about you, Danny Pastor? What’s your game?” He talked quietly, and it was hard to hear him over the roar of the wind from their passing. Danny had to lean toward him to catch all the words.

  “Aw, I just hang around Puerto Vallarta. Saved up a little money a while back, and I’m living on that.”

  don’t do anything, then? Just lie around Las Noches with the rest of the gringos? I stopped in there the other day. What a pile of dog crap that was—all of them flopped in beach chairs, stomachs bulging, drinking beer and telling lies. Looked to me like kind of a kamikaze lifestyle. Ever go there?”

  A feeling kept coming back to Danny that what he was doing was the wrong thing to be doing, that he might be in over his head. “C’mon, Pastor,” his brain was talking again, “hang together, he’s just fishing. You’re a smart guy, dominate him. You know the big secret about him. He doesn’t know anything about you. Do the kind of work you’re capable of doing.”

  “Yeah, I go to Las Noches sometimes.”

  “I had you pegged for a writer, something like that.” The shooter let a few seconds go by, then added, “I always thought I’d like to put some things down on paper, “fou ever do any writing?”

  Christ, this guy was unbelievable. Danny’s confidence was lurching back in the direction of shaky. He’d started out thinking about the matchup between a robot assassin— cocky and crude like the wiseguys, but dumber, he figured—and a crack reporter, which shouldn’t have been any contest at all. Yet Danny kept getting the sense of the shooter being something more than an eye and a gun.

  Danny’s old skills were latent, but back there someplace. He kept telling himself that. Still, the booze and sun and loose life in general had dulled him. He’d been aware of that happening but never noticed how far he’d dropped until that moment. He was feeling rusty and rattled but kept talking to himself: Get tough, get smart, get on top of him.

  So what if you’re a writer. That doesn’t mean anything as long as he doesn�
�t catch on to what you know.

  “I did a little writing once. Nothing recently.”

  “Got a case of… what do they call it?… writer’s block?”

  “I never much liked that term. It’s a copout way of looking at things, like some invisible force has a fist around your mind and is squeezing it.”

  “Well, then what would you call it?” Desert boot tapping on the dash, cigarette ashes flipped into the wind.

  Danny listened to the hum of Vito’s tires. He jerked the wheel and took the Bronco around a bad hole in the pavement, settled down again. Looked at his watch and couldn’t see the dial in bad light.

  “It’s almost six,” the shooter said. “I’ve always been fascinated with writers. So if it’s not writer’s block, what is it?”

  Danny had started out to interview the shooter. But the shooter was curling things back around on him, doing a neat Socratic sideslip.

  “Like I said before, calling it writer’s block kind of lets you off the hook. When I’m writing and get stuck, I prefer to think of it as a conceptual problem I have to work out. Intellectual gridlock you’ve got to get by.”

  “I like that.” The shooter unscrewed the top of a water jug and took a long drink, replaced the top. “Puts the responsibility back on yourself rather than thinking some mysterious outside force is in control of your destiny.”

  “You don’t believe in outside forces? In bad luck?”

  “Not much. I suppose it happens. But a whole lot of people blame their predicaments on bad luck rather than taking responsibility for the situation they’ve gotten themselves into and for getting out of that situation and on to something better, You‘re about entitled to what you get and not too much more.”

  Danny tried to climb back on top of the dialogue, ’”fou travel a lot in your line of work?”

  “Quite a bit. How’d you end up in Puerto Vallarta? Not running from the IRS, I hope.”

  Damn, if this was some kind of Socratic game, the shooter was good. One of Danny’s old professors in journalism school used to say, “Ask short questions, keep them talking, avoid the tendency to get into a lecture yourself.”

  “Got divorced a while back. Running from her and the memories, not the IRS. Looking for warmer weather. Just drifted down here. Where do your travels take you?”

  The shooter flipped his cigarette out, and Danny could see sparks in the rearview mirror where it hit the pavement. “Wherever there’s something gunking up the system. Like I said, garbage cleanup. What do you think of those two guys back in Puerto Vallarta… Willie and Lobo? Like their music?”

  ““feah, how’d you know?” Danny looked over at him, looked quick, then stared at the road.

  “Saw you and her in a place the other night.” The shooter canted his head back toward where Luz was sleeping. “Seemed like you were having a good time, dancing around the tables and all that. What’s that place called? Seafood soup, green salads…”

  “You mean Mamma Mia?” Danny had a strange feeling that someone was swinging a big stick from behind him where he couldn’t see it coming.

  “That’s it… Mamma Mia. I thought the music was pretty decent. Has a certain power, certain energy to it, don’t you think? What kind of music would you call it? Never heard anything quite like it before.”

  “I don’t know. Willie and Lobo call it ‘gypsy-jazz’ or something along those lines.”

  They were running hard down a long hill, coming into Santa Cruz, jungle giving way to fields. In spaces between the trees Danny could see breakers hitting the shore a few miles west of them. Farther out and beyond mountain shadow, the ocean was colored soft rose. A hundred miles south of them, Walter McGrane’s Learjet was beginning its descent into Puerto Vallarta.

  The shooter bent over, reached in a side pocket of his knapsack, and took out a fresh pack of Marlboros. “The world can never have too much gypsy music.”

  Danny thought about that and it seemed right, some elemental truth. Seemed like there was something in what the shooter had said that went beyond music. Something to do with firelight and fast guitars and the stamp of bare feet near painted wagons that would roll when morning came. Something to do with moving quick and living off your wits, like the shooter was doing, like Danny was trying to do.

  The road curved west for a mile and took them down to the outskirts of Santa Cruz. Danny turned right and ran parallel to the Pacific, which was a block or so to their left, past cottages for rent and cottages for sale. Mexican tourists came here; so did a few gringos. In the mirror, Danny could see Luz sitting up.

  He looked over at the shooter. “Think maybe we ought to stop, get a little rest? I’m feeling sort of numb and scratchy.”

  “Sounds right to me. I’m tired myself. Know any place to stay?”

  “Yeah, there’s two or three places in San Bias, as I remember. One called Las Brisas is pretty nice. The others are a little rough, but okay.”

  “Let’s try the better one.” His choice made sense. Stay where the gringos were mostly likely to stay, be less noticeable that way.

  Las Brisas had its doors open, but the desk was closed. Luz talked to an old man tending things, came back to the Bronco, and said there wouldn’t be anyone there to check them in until eight o’clock, an hour and a half farther on. The shooter was watching uniformed navy personnel from the military installation in San Bias walk by the Bronco, on their way to defend the shores of Mexico. Somewhere back in the hotel grounds a parrot was jabbering.

  “You said there’s another place?” The shooter looked dying tired, the lines under his eyes fanning out into concentric semicircles.

  “Yeah, a few blocks from here. The best part about it is the stuffed crocodile in the lobby and an old copy of the buccaneer’s creed of freedom etched on the wall. San Bias has a colorful history, not to mention the worst bug problem of any place you’ll ever be. The damn bugs can drive you crazy.”

  “Let’s find some breakfast, then come back here and check in.” He was still watching military people walking by.

  At eight-fifteen they were back at Las Brisas. Still no desk clerk. Luz told the night boy, who was about eighty, that her gringo friends were getting tired and cranky. A few minutes later a woman in a nightdress and bathrobe appeared and checked them in. They’d gotten her up, and she wasn’t happy about it. Danny took a room for Luz and him, another for the shooter.

  They were a bad-looking outfit, wrinkled and beat, sweat coming heavy again in the humidity of the Mexican coast and streaking down through the dust in which they’d bathed at the road construction site. The woman behind the desk studied Luz’s “Puerto Vallarta Squeeze” T-shirt, then glanced at the ceiling for a moment, thinking social changes were definitely needed but maybe not quite so much all at once.

  Danny slept until a little after four in the afternoon. He woke up blinking, feeling grungy and groggy. Luz came out of the bathroom, naked, hair wet, and grinning at him. She had slightly oversize breasts for her general overall proportions and carried them high. They pulled up even higher when she reached behind her neck with both hands and twisted her hair. Along with good oP Missy Morganthal back in his undergraduate days, who’d have shucked her jeans in the student union if he’d asked, Luz could get Danny up and rolling faster than any woman he’d ever known. But in that moment of waking and blinking and giving out dusty coughs, he needed coffee and a shower more than he needed Luz. Before he could even mention it, Luz stepped into underthings and said she’d run down coffee while Danny showered.

  When he came out of the bathroom, the coffee was there and Luz was gone. He got dressed and stood outside the room, steaming cup in his right hand and a lazy sun headed toward evening. Luz was thirty yards away, sitting by the swimming pool, talking to someone in the water. Danny walked over.

  The shooter was paddling around, doing a capable breast stroke. He pulled himself up and sat on the edge of the pool, looking good in his red-and-blue boxer trunks, looking in the body like he wasn’t
as old as his face indicated last night. Maybe six three, and lean, but strong in the shoulders and still having a pretty good chest and no belly at all. His knapsack was sitting near the edge of the pool where he could keep an eye on it.

  “Buenas tardes,” said the shooter, pushing back his wet hair until it lay straight and flat against his head.

  That’s when Danny noticed the scars on his legs, running all the way up his thighs and disappearing under the swim-suit. Mean, ugly scars, as if they’d come from a dirty knife and had never healed properly. More scars on his back and chest.

  Danny recovered and said good afternoon back to him, then found a chair in the shade and brushed away no-see-ums that returned only a moment later, starting to sweat again in high coastal humidity.

  The water had some appeal, but Danny hadn’t brought a swimsuit. Neither had Luz, but she’d rolled up her jeans and was sitting on the edge of the pool, swishing her feet back and forth in the water. For some reason, she was smiling.

  The shooter stood up, getting ready to go back to his room, knapsack dangling in his hand. “How about staying here for the night. Get rested, make good time tomorrow.”

  Danny said that was fine with him. Mexican highways at night were just too much work.

  “You’ve been here before?” The shooter was running a towel over his hair.

  ””feah, once… in San Bias, that is. Several years ago, when I was drifting south. Stayed at the place with the stuffed crocodile and fought off bugs all night. The screens had holes in them.”

  Danny hadn’t met Luz at that time and had spent an evening in an upstairs gringo bar, a place called Tacky Chuck’s, looking out the window. Some kind of celebration had been going on, people marching around the plaza, a band playing. He’d talked with a young American woman named Stacie—50 percent of young American women seemed to have that Christian name—who came from LA. and whose conversation mostly consisted of “like… uh… you know.” She told him she didn’t believe… like, uh, you know… in institutionalized religion, that she worshiped God in her own way.