Free Puerto Vallarta Squeeze by Robert James Waller

Puerto Vallarta:
Layin’ around the Oceana,
Overhead fans and no hot water.
Drinkin’ tequila and teasing the girls,
Hustlin’ a fisherman’s daughter.
    Luz was telling the shooter how much she wanted to live in the United States someday. He listened attentively, nodding from time to time, but didn’t say anything.
    The light was fading fast, almost gone.

FLAMENCO AFTERNOONS
    F our horses and a colt slumbered along Juárez, taking their time. Danny Pastor waited for them to move over, shifted up through the gears, and headed toward the outskirts of San Bias. There he turned east on a road that would take them up to Route 15, the main north-south highway in western Mexico. It was a good morning, mist coming off ponds and rivers and colored amberish by early light. A good morning, a full, bright morning in May, soft and warm and making it seem as if everything might turn out all right.
    Still, Danny was impatient and the opposite of that, all at the same time, flopping around somewhere in the middle ambiguities. In his thoughtful moments he considered what would happen if they were stopped by one or another police outfit, trying to think what he might say about a passenger who carried no tourist card. Ordinarily that could be worked out with mordida, but it was hard to say what level of interest in gringos of all kinds had been generated by the killings in Puerto Vallarta. Maybe none at all, maybe a lot, maybe it was just being treated as a local problem. The conservative Danny was inclined to head for the border, fast. The other Danny knew he should take his time, get to know the shooter inside out, needed to do that if the story was going to be all it could be.
    The shooter had put on dark green sunglasses and his ball cap, drinking coffee from a paper cup. He was wearing the same clothes as the night before, still reasonably pressed, in spite of the heat and humidity. His eyes were better this morning, not as tired. Danny, wearing green cotton shorts and an old, multiwrinkled ecru shirt with a plain collar, felt rumpled and disorderly compared with the shooter, who had an air of military about him, of neatness and slow, deliberate precision.
    Luz was rested and showed it, smiling, bouncing along in her little space behind the shooter and Danny. She pointed at a long-tailed blue magpie jay flying through the trees to their right, morning light showing for an instant through the translucent blue of the bird’s tail and wings. What could be better for her? Nothing. A pleasant morning and headed for el Norte, where she’d always wanted to go.
    Two bobwhite quail scurried across the highway, running on short, quick legs, then lifted off and flickered into the Guaycoyul palms. Red-flowered trees, yellow-flowered trees. The shooter asked Luz about the red ones, and she replied, “Tabachin, Mexican bird of paradise.”
    They climbed east over the low coastal mountains and could see the Sierra Madre rising up fifty miles ahead of them, across a big valley, and the peaks looking light purple in the haze. Curves and hills, villages waking up, donkey carts and men on horseback driving cattle, schoolchildren walking along the road. Close-up smoke from cooking fires, distant smoke from slash-and-burn farming where hillsides were being cleared. Man along the highway with the two items most common to men walking along rural highways in Mexico: old brown dog and a machete. It was at least eighty and climbing fast. Danny was guessing at something over a hundred later on. Soft morning, flamenco afternoon.

    The Bronco called Vito rolled north through an invisible communications web becoming more intricately dense by the hour, a humming meshwork of unseen words and orders reaching out with the single purpose of finding a man known as Tortoise. After refueling in San Antonio, the Learjet out of Andrews had landed in Puerto Vallarta twenty-four hours ago. As instructed by the tower, the plane had been parked near a row of Mexican military