Free Puerto Vallarta Squeeze by Robert James Waller Page A

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 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