Free Puerto Vallarta Squeeze by Robert James Waller Page A

aircraft at the edge of the airport. Walter McGrane and his compadres were picked up by a white Dodge van and taken away without passing through immigration or customs. Two hours later, heavily armed men had begun spreading out from various posts in Mexico, covering airports and bus terminals and railroad stations, riding through the countryside in trucks and vans. All of them on the watch for a man who’d cut down two people in Puerto Vallarta. And all of them had the same instructions: If Clayton Price was spotted, report in, but do not engage. Repeat: Do not engage.
    Walter McGrane sat near the roar of a window air conditioner in the Puerto Vallarta police station, drinking coffee and trying to guess which way Clayton Price was headed. Weatherford and the other man were in the next room, speaking Spanish to each other, monitoring reports from the field. Nothing, so far. But something would turn up. It always did. And when it did, they would find Clayton Price and kill him and go home.

    The shooter hadn’t said anything since they’d left the Las Brisas, as if he were thinking hard and deep, though twice he’d turned to glance at Luz. At a little past nine they hit Route 15. Danny turned left with America-the-beautiful three days north of them. A Pemex station came up, and Danny filled both the front and rear tanks of the Bronco, put in a quart of oil. The attendant had tried the old gas-pump trick, neglecting to ratchet the dial back to zero before he stuck the nozzle in the Bronco. Danny’d caught him at it, put his hand on the attendant’s arm, and pointed at the gauge. The attendant had merely shrugged, as if he’d forgotten that nicety in the process of providing good, fast service.
    Little villages rolled by, some of them near the road, some a half mile or so on either side, hot and dirty and rough as hell. Ragged wash on clotheslines, brown dogs asleep in the shade, burros wandering around.
    “Damn, that’s tough living,” Danny said, trying to make conversation. “Those places are pits.”
    The shooter looked and said nothing. He’d seen dusty little villages all over the world and had squatted in them and had eaten with his right hand when the villagers had something to spare. He’d always paid for what he’d eaten, unless it was the village custom to make travelers comfortable and where payment would be an insult. He’d eaten monkey and snake and bird and dog and croc and things in brown stew that floated greasy and fat, wondering if the greasy fat things also wondered about what their happy life had come to. Stew had a way of abolishing identity, mercifully so.
    Passing by Santa Penita, an especially bad-looking potpourri of houses and dirt streets, Danny shook his head, glad he wasn’t living there in heat and dust. No matter where he was headed, it would never come to that.
    “I grew up in a village just like that one, lived in a house just like those, went to a little adobe school like the one we just went by.” Luz was kneeling between them, looking out the windshield. “Danny, it’s unkind to say and think such things. These are poor people; life is very hard for them.”
    She’d heard it before—gringo superiority, tourists open-mouthed and aghast at how the po’ folks live and why doesn’t somebody do something about it, and what happens to all that foreign aid we send? That sort of bullshit clucking.
    Danny turned to her. “You’re right. Sorry.”
    The shooter was thinking along the same lines. “Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, you know. Americans born into luxury’s cradle, then escaping it by running down here looking for meaning because all the crap we buy somehow doesn’t cut it for us. And while we’re looking, we’re bitching about the sanitation setup of a destitute Mexican village. Ever strike you we’re nuttier than hell, Danny Pastor?”
    “Yeah, I know what you mean. Along with that, I remember the writer Carlos Fuentes saying all gringos look alike to