Puerto Vallarta Squeeze (2 page)

After a few blocks, Danny slowed down and Luz decided an ice cream was necessary. They bought her a cone and walked another
block. When they got to El Rondo, little joint with a three-stool bar and four tables, Danny said he needed a drink. Felipe
poured him a double tequila and said it was too goddamn hot even for this time of the year and if the goddamn rains would
come, things would cool down a little. Danny nodded and wiped his face with a paper napkin.

Luz was licking her blackberry cone, Danny watching her pink tongue circle the mound of ice cream. She watched him watching
her and started moving her tongue slow around the ice cream and over the top of it, then put her mouth on it and sucked a
little, keeping her eyes on his all the while she was doing these things. She sat back and licked the ice cream from her lips,
taking her time and grinning at Danny.

Felipe, who was noticing this unhurried dance toward later-on ecstasy, patted his face with a bar rag and looked at Danny.
Danny shook his head and gave Felipe a grin and shrug, still trying to put together what he’d seen fifteen minutes earlier.
And shivering inside when he pulled the images up, in the way of remembering a dream you say you don’t want to remember but
keep remembering anyway because terror has its own fascination, if it’s once or twice removed from your own reality. Once
or twice removed—terror, that is—until it slow crawls over the transom of your life and pauses there for a moment, looking
around for you, eyes bright hard and caring not for your transient joys and sorrows, tongue casting about for your scent.

Movement out on the rim of his left eye, and Danny turned slightly. The man carrying a tan knapsack hesitated at the door
to Felipe’s before coming inside. Silverish hair and khaki pants. And light blue eyes, maybe gray blue, looking as if they’d
seen to the end of things and back. Kind of dead eyes, but with a flicker of something far back inside, like a flashlight
coming toward you through the dark from a long way off. Danny’s heart seemed not to be working at that moment.

The shooter eased onto a chair, nodded to Felipe. “Tequila,
por favor.”

Luz was looking at the shooter. So was Danny, but trying to appear as if he weren’t. Still, he couldn’t help glancing at the
knapsack the man put under the table five feet away, thinking the two of them, he and the shooter, were the only ones who
knew what was in there, but believing the shooter didn’t know he knew. And what was in there was the worst kind of bad you
could imagine. Danny ordered another double while Luz chewed her cone down to nothing and stared at the shooter in the direct,
impertinent way she had when she was curious about something or somebody.

After drinking half his tequila in one swallow, the shooter lit a Marlboro and looked straight at Danny. He was older than
he’d seemed when Danny had watched him in El Niño, maybe in his middle fifties or a little more. Dark circles under his eyes,
the kind coming with age or from worrying too much or from not getting enough sleep too many nights in a row.

“Buenas noches,”
the shooter said, lifting his drink up an inch or two in a miniature salute. Gave Danny half a smile, hard smile though.

Danny nodded, said the same thing back to him, working at keeping his voice steady and feeling some bit of a thing coming
around in his mind and swimming in there kind of eel-like, more than just hazy shadows yet still not formed in any recognizable
way. But it had to do with writing and making money from writing. Maybe the first real money since
Chicago Underground
had come out six years ago. After that, it had been downhill to here, and
here
was beginning to lack a certain charm.

Following
Chicago Underground,
the recollections of an ace reporter, he’d turned to fiction. His first novel,
All the Boys Who Ever Were,
had shown its face in 1989 and fallen on it. “Naive and self-congratulatory; intrepid young journalists in search of truth,
regardless of the cost to themselves,” said one critic. Another sliced even harder: “However much journalists might like to
think of themselves as serious writers, there is, or should be, a rather profound difference between fiction and journalism
(though one must admit that difference is becoming more and more indistinguishable). Nonetheless, whatever Mr. Pastor’s credentials
as a newspaper reporter may be, he certainly is not a novelist and should return forthwith to what he apparently does best—
reporting.”

As the checks from his agent thinned down to survival money, Danny kept telling Luz and the dross down at Las Noches, where
the gringo would-bes and might-have-beens and were-at-one-times hung out and devastated their livers, that he had five or
six good ideas under way. What he had and knew he had was rubbish, tales already told a hundred times over and nothing to
separate his telling of them from what’d already been said. But he was thinking, not too clearly, and more at the level of
instinct than conscious thought, there might be a hell of a story in all this if he could just figure out how to bend it the
right way. Get the story, then turn the virulent bastard over to the cops. Perfect: Danny gets rich, Luz is happy, the shooter
hangs for his indecencies, and… the goddamn critics get it shoved up their noses.

The shooter helped Danny along, or maybe pushed him along, as Danny came to think of it later on.

“I’m looking for a ride up to the border… know any-one going that way? I’m willing to pay well for a lift.” He was speaking
English with pretty good diction, a slow and almost lazy cadence to his voice, keeping his words quiet enough so Felipe couldn’t
hear. Didn’t matter, since Danny was pretty sure Felipe didn’t understand English anyway

“That’s a long haul,” Danny said, shoving his hands underneath his thighs and sitting hard on them to hold down what might
have evolved into a noticeable shake. He looked down at his feet and could see the third toe of his left foot peeking at him
through a hole in his sneakers. “Three, three and a half hard days, depending on where you’re headed.”

He glanced at the shooter. “Most people fly down here except for truckers and those who have long-term rentals or own houses.”

Danny was sweating even more than the evening called for, but nobody seemed to notice. The shooter kept one foot against his
knapsack, knowing that way where it was all the time and keeping close track of it. A taxi horn honked twice in the street,
and a group of tourists went by Felipe’s door, a male voice shouting, “Are you sure this’s the right way to Pizza Joe’s?”

“Danny has Ford Bronco named Vito.” Luz had finished her cone and moved into the conversation, smelling money She knew they
were short, and Luz liked margaritas and going uptown to hear Willie and Lobo and eating lobster at a beach restaurant up
the coast in Bucerias. The shooter looked at her; lots of men looked at Luz. She was turned toward him, fine, slim legs crossed
and running out from under her lavender dress, the hem of which had worked its way above her knees, wheat-colored sandal hanging
from only one toe with silver nail polish on it.

“Who’s Danny?”

Luz poked her finger against Danny’s arm. “This Danny.” She was grinning and speaking pidgin English, which she did sometimes,
even though she handled English just about perfectly when she felt like it. Danny signaled Felipe for another double shot.

The shooter waved off a mosquito buzzing around his right ear, looked at Danny. “You interested in giving me a lift up there,
to the border? Say, Laredo or Brownsville, maybe farther west?” Slow, easy words, as if he didn’t care when he might get to
the border or if he got there at all.

“Not particularly. If I were, I’d charge a hell of a lot more than a first-class ticket on Mexicana would cost.” Pretty good,
Danny was thinking. A little cagey, showing lack of interest, but still leaving the door open, slowly getting back some of
the old confidence from his killer journalism years. Do it the way you did when you were courting the Chicago mob and getting
the dope for
Chicago Underground,
making them think they were tough, practical guys who grew up on the scramble while the carriage trade was going off to college.
You’ve handled big dicks before, and the shooter comes off as an easygoing country boy compared to the Chicago wiseguys. Not
too smart, either, shooting from the window of a crowded bar. The Chicago kids would have done it in the back on a dark street
and ridden the evening train afterward. Danny—Danny boy—get up and get on the high wire and walk it. Walk the wire, concentrate
on the other end and don’t look down.

The shooter finished his drink, smiled again in that something less than genuine way of his. “I don’t like airplanes, never
have. Friend dropped me off here from his sailboat. How much?” Now he was concentrating on Luz and her legs or the sandal
dangling expectantly from her toe, or some or all of that.

Danny sank back a little. This wasn’t working out quite the way he’d expected. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but this
didn’t seem to be it. He was feeling somehow he ought to be more in control of the plot, yet the shooter seemed to be moving
things along at his own pace. But there was something here worth the telling, something that could bring in some real money
and a first-class piece of writing to boot. Danny didn’t know much about Mexican law, but in the States this would be called
aiding and abetting. If he hauled this guy’s tail up to Laredo or wherever, would he be getting himself in serious trouble?
Probably, but only if he actually knew the shooter had done something… which he did know.

On the other hand, a writer’s got to take risks sometime, especially when you’re short and might have to take some kind of
real job if things don’t pick up. Sit around on your can down at Las Noches and nothing happens.
Rolling Stone
would jump at this stuff if he did it as a Hunter Thompson gonzo kind of piece, or maybe it could be serialized in
Esquire
for ten grand and turned into a novel later on. Maybe a film option, too. Call it fiction or write it under a pseudonym.
Or make up stuff and pass it off as true, call it “new journalism.”

Danny’s agent was good at figuring out those details. He could hear her saying, “Go for it, Danny boy; this jerk’s nothing
more than offal for the great American sausage machine called publishing. What’re you going to do with your remaining days,
follow all the bullshit dictums of the careful life? Keep your hands in the boat, stay away from the road? Get a do-it-yourself
will kit, have a V-8? A buck’s a buck, take ’im down. Besides, it’ll help with your support payments to Janice and little
Robbie, which I understand you’re not making at the present time and better start making if you’re ever thinking about coming
out of Mexico and joining the American parade again.”

Something popped inside. “Three thousand American, plus expenses. Fifteen hundred up front.” Danny figured it was an absolute
ripoff price, making it seem he wasn’t all that anxious to go north.

The shooter didn’t even blink. “Done. When can we leave?”

Caught on the stagger, Danny waited a second or two before answering, feeling his mind trying to make decisions without any
help from him. Brain sent message to mouth, mouth talked. “Day or two. The Bronco needs a little work.”

And while he was saying this out loud in a lurch toward high chance, he was also saying to himself, Back up, back down, get
out and go home. Still, events have a force of their own once they’re under way, and it was too late, somehow. Somehow, too
late. Confusing: tequila, money, Luz, back to
el Norte
and better things… no… yes… shit, what am I doing?

“Would an extra two thousand plus twenty-five hundred front-end money get me a departure in the next couple of hours? I have
to meet someone in Dallas.” Some part of Danny’s mind was working on the shooter’s accent, trying to place it. Mostly nondescript
midwestern, with a hint of East Coast here and there on certain words.

Somewhere in the middle of a tunnel closing behind him, Danny Pastor was looking backward and going forward at the same time.
Mouth again: “The Mexican high-ways are messy, gets long and lonely out there, especially at night. Things can go wrong.”

The shooter thought for a moment, then spoke slowly with an interior smile underneath his words. “Sounds like an overall description
of life to me. What’s the problem, bad fellows?”

“Maybe. Break down and the local thugs who have a general dislike for gringos might try to beat on us. Word is, bandidos are
back in business on Fifteen up north and also around Durango, east in the mountains. On top of that, the
federates
can think up about a million reasons to give you trouble, even if you aren’t involved in any trouble to start with. They
operate as their own law, more or less. Hard to tell ’em from the bandidos. Mexican law descends from the Napoleonic Code,
not English common law, so habeas corpus is not part of doing business down here. They get you in jail and figure you’ll just
sit there for life or until someone from the States sends a few thousand in bribe money to get you out.”

The shooter toyed with his empty shot glass, tilted it up, and looked at the bottom. “Well, there’s two of us. We can watch
each other’s backs, can’t we?”

He glanced up at Danny, who wasn’t sure whether the question was rhetorical or required an answer, decided on the former,
and focused momentarily on where the shooter was fiddling with his shot glass—the little finger on his left hand was missing.

In any case, by the easy way he’d said it, the shooter obviously wasn’t worried about village thugs or bandidos, maybe not
even federates
or anyone else who might jump up and get in his way. He’d just cracked some important-looking gringo plus a naval officer
for whatever reason, and he was sitting there with that hard little smile of his, like the whole thing was an evening stroll
along the Malecón.

Danny was still considering a fast tunnel backward toward the light of where he was an hour ago, toward recommended and sensible
boundaries. Alternatives: Stay in Puerto Vallarta and ride Luz María’s warm and willing body into another thousand sunsets,
get some real work done on another book while waiting for the next royalty check that’d be less than the previous one. Good
choice, if low risk and even lower money were the criteria.