Puerto Vallarta Squeeze (25 page)

Danny made Puerto Vallarta and opened the door to his apartment at midnight. It was quiet and smelled a little stale, but
underneath the staleness was the scent of Luz, her perfume, her body oil on the sheets. He turned on the lights and went immediately
to the bathroom, looking for the gun. It wasn’t there, but what
was
there was a knock on the door. He opened it: three cops and another man wearing a business suit. The suit held up a plastic
bag and dangled it in Danny’s face.

In the bag was the shooter’s gun, the one he’d used in El Niño. Somebody had known something and had talked about it. Probably
the guy who was mad at Danny for spewing oily smoke into his apartment the week before. Shit, who knows. Who cares. He heard
a rumor later on, however, that the police had worked over Felipe pretty hard, and he might have said Luz and Danny had been
in El Rondo the night of the killing and that they’d left with Clayton Price.

anny got a ten-year sentence on vague charges, something about ’assisting criminal elements.” The assassination weapon in
his apartment was fairly heavy circumstantial evidence, but they never actually charged him with the shooting itself. After
a little over seventeen months in a Mexico City prison, his cell door swung open one day, and he was told he was free to go
and to get the hell out of Mexico and never come back.
Vamos, andele!
No explanation, nothing. They’d tired of feeding him, that’s all he could figure out, and escorted him to the bus station,
where he was given a one-way ticket for Laredo.

With Clayton Price gone, Danny had welshed on his bargain and had written up the whole adventure while he was in prison, bribing
a guard to mail it on to his New “fork agent. He never saw the manuscript again, never heard a thing. Maybe it didn’t get
to her. Maybe it did. To hell with it. It was a pretty breathless piece of writing, anyway.

Danny had kept a stash of emergency money in a Chicago bank and sent for it. With interest it came to a little over six thousand
dollars. He bought another old pickup and drove it south across the border, pulling into Zapata three days later.

Nobody remembered him. He ate at the cantina and took the same room where he and Luz had stayed a year and a half earlier.
Sitting on the bed, he thought about the last time they’d made love on that same bed. He walked down to the silver mine and
looked around. No trace of the shootout; he didn’t expect there’d be any. But scuffing in the dust, he found a rusty shell
casing, small caliber. From the shooter’s pistol, maybe. He stuck it in his pocket and carries it with him, some kind of talisman
and some kind of warning instead of a tattoo on the thumb.

A couple of new gringos had moved into the village, and Danny talked with them later that night. They drank tequila and regaled
him with stories of the great Zapata shootout, which, of course, had become part of the village’s long saga and a tourist
attraction in its own right. In the story, the shooter was made out to be bigger than life, which in a way he was, Danny supposed.
And Luz was said to be one of the most desirable women ever to walk the earth, which in a way she was, at least that’s where
Danny’s thinking had taken him by that time. There was only brief mention of a third person, another gringo. Nobody knew what
happened to him for sure, some hearsay about him dying in prison.

One of the storytellers said, “If Gustavo comes by, he’ll sing you a song he wrote about the whole business. Hell, they even
buried the woman up in the Zapata cemetery on the edge of town. People go up there and look at her grave all the time.”

That’s what Danny had come for, to see if anybody knew where Luz had been buried. Out of curiosity he asked what had happened
to the shooter’s body. One of the gringos said the killer had also been buried in the Zapata cemetery, but that someone had
stolen the marker and the exact location of the grave had been forgotten.

To Danny, the whereabouts of the shooter’s bones wasn’t all that important, anyhow. After knowing Clayton Price and listening
to him talk about his life and work, Danny had started believing there’d always be shooters, and along the line somewhere
he remembered what Sir Thomas Browne once said: “But who knows the fate of his bones or how often he is to be buried.” He
figured a Clayton Price was still out there in one form or another, shade or otherwise, settling into his bubble and looking
down a 9x scope.

Danny told the local constable he was a brother of the woman’s first husband and had come to claim her body. The constable
didn’t believe him. Danny flashed fifty bucks and the constable believed him. The constable even helped dig up Luz’s grave
and lift the plain pine coffin into the bed of Danny’s pickup. Danny drove back to Route 15, headed south, and turned west
one more time, passing the village where the ocelot had been caged. The cage was gone from its place under the banana tree.

Outside of Ceylaya he stopped the truck. It took him a long time to drag the coffin up the hill, but he got it done, sweating
and panting and resting now and then, and trying to ignore rattling sounds from inside the box. Flies everywhere, driving
him half crazy, but he worked through the afternoon, digging a new grave for Luz. He eased her coffin down into the hole and
shoveled dirt over it, all the while crying so hard he couldn’t see what he was doing most of the time.

Toward sunset he finished and walked back down to the truck. In Escuinapa, he’d had a small marker fashioned out of stone.
In Spanish, it read

María de la Luz Santos

1971-1993

Nothing Remains

But Flowers and Sad Songs

He lugged the stone up the hill and set it firmly at the head of the grave. Scouting around in the nearby fields, he picked
some red flowers and then laid them on the fresh-shoveled dirt. Danny Pastor stood there for a long time, leaning on the shovel.
The image of Luz teaching the shooter to dance that evening in Zapata kept coming back. The yellow dress… the flower in her
hair… his big clumsy steps… music playing. And he remembered her humming softly after she’d returned from Clayton Price’s
room that night. And he remembered hot salsa music and Luz smiling and coming naked across a Puerto Vallarta room toward him
with “La Rosa Negra” booming out of the Panasonic.

Darkness had rolled over the Mexican countryside when he passed the ocelot’s former place of imprisonment. Danny slowed the
truck and looked out across the fields. Nothing there, of course. The cat was probably in a dirty traveling zoo by now or
on the back of some rich woman in Paris. What the hell, you do what you can.

When Danny got to Route 15, he leaned forward, resting on the wheel, looking up and down the highway at head-lights rolling
hard in both directions, diesel trucks and cars and silver green Pacífico buses, long lines of them. After a while he turned
left… and late… much too late and alone… toward
el Norte.

Thanks go to my wife, Georgia Ann, who first heard this story in Puerto Vallarta a while back and said it sounded true and
worth the telling. She sat through several interviews with various people, helped me piece the story together, and we did
a preliminary layout of the book during two evenings we spent in a place called Las Palomas, both of us drinking a little
Pacifico along the way and sitting at a particular table where you can put your back against the wall and sweep the room and
see who comes in, who’s walking along Aldama on your left, and what’s happening out on Ordaz.

Thanks to Kathe Goldstein for watching over the Spanish terms, to Mary Ellen Rochester and Gary Thompson for background information
on Puerto Vallarta, and to Carol Johnson, Susan Rueschhoff, Gary Goldstein, Linda Kettner, Bill Silag, and Shirley Koslowski,
all of whom read various versions of the manuscript and offered helpful advice. And thanks to Sam Cavness, cowboy and veteran
of the Vietnam jungles, for his reading of the manuscript. Also, thanks to Audrey Farrell, who worked as my assistant for
several years and did her best to keep me organized during the time I was writing this.

And, of course,
muchas gracias
to my friend J. R. Ackley of Marble Rock, Iowa, who twice accompanied me to Mexico as my driver. Even though the U.S. State
Department was advising travelers not to use the road to Durango because of heavy bandit activity and we were headed that
way, I said “absolutely not” when J.R. wanted to take his .45 automatic pistol with him (though, I must admit, there were
several occasions in the backcountry when I wished we’d taken the gun). Shorn of the .45, J.R. nonetheless moved us in safety
and good humor along hot, busy roads and through quiet mountains, while I thought about Danny and Luz and a shadowman named
Clayton Price, and how all of this must have felt to them during their run for
el Norte.

The quote dealing with the medicinal properties of beer is J.R.’s. He came up with it at the tail of a hot, dusty day when
we had finished a long hike up a remote riverbed and spent time with a man named Don Francisco Quintera, who calls himself
the “Keeper of Guadalupe.”

Thanks, many thanks, to my friends Willie Royal, violinist, and Lobo, flamenco guitarist, for all the soaring nights of magic
in a place called Mamma Mia. I listened to tapes of their music while writing portions of this book (Willie&Lobo,
Gypsy Boogaloo
and
Fandango Nights,
both on Mesa Records). And to all of my friends at the special inn where I have stayed many times in Puerto Vallarta, who
have been so kind and helpful. And also to Daniel, who gave us somewhere to rest in the mountains, in a small village near
the Durango road, and told us stories of the Mexican outback. And to the old men of the village I have called Zapata here,
who lean their chairs against the walls of their village, smoking and resting and talking after a day in the fields.

Certain phrases contained in the fictional account of Clayton Price’s dossier, in “Shadowman,” were taken directly from James
W Clarke,
American Assassins
(Princeton University Press, 1982).

Finally, I need to mention a curious and haunting circumstance involving background research for this story. While we drove
through Mexico on our first scouting trip, tracing the exact route of Luz, Danny, and Clayton Price, J.R. told me about a
book describing the life and times of a famous sniper in Vietnam. He couldn’t remember the name of the book but said it was
fairly obscure and that I would have trouble finding it. After several weeks on the road, we checked out of our small Mexican
hotel in Puerto Vallarta to catch our flight home. As I was headed for the taxi, I walked by a counter serving as a book exchange
for guests of the hotel. There was only one book on the shelf, well thumbed and hard used,
the
book:
Marine Sniper.
As anyone who’s been around will tell you, it gets strange out there.

WORLDWIDE BESTSELLING, AWARD-WINING AUTHOR ROBERT JAMES WALLER

The Bridges of Madison County

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Slow waltz in Cedar Bend

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Border Music

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