Puerto Vallarta Squeeze

by Robert James Waller

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

The author of the blockbuster The Bridges of Madison County blends passion and adventure in the story of an American novelist in Mexico and his young lover, who take a trip with a killer.

Release date: September 26, 2009

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 224

Sample

This guy Lobo, whose real and true name was Wolfgang Fink, played better than good flamenco guitar in a place called Mamma
Mia in Puerto Vallarta. Had a partner name of Willie Royal, tall gangly guy who was balding a little early and wore glasses
and played hot gypsy-jazz violin. They’d worked out a repertoire of their own tunes, “Improvisation #18” and “Gypsy Rook”
as examples, played ’em high and hard, rolled through “Amsterdam” and “The Sultan’s Dream” with enough power to set you two
times free or even beyond that when the day had been tolerable and the night held promise. Lobo, sun worn and hard lined in
the face, looking over at Willie Royal bobbing and weaving and twisting his face into a mean imitation of a death mask when
he really got into it, right wrist looking almost limp but moving his bow at warp speed across the strings, punctuated here
and there by Lobo’s stabbing ruscados and finger tapping on the guitar top.


Good music, wonderful music, tight and wild all at the same time. On those nights when the sweat ran down your back and veneered
your face and the gringitas looked good enough to swallow whole—knowing too they looked just that way and them watching the
crowd to see who might be man enough to try it—people would be riding on the music, drinking and clapping in flamenco time,
dancing around the dinner tables.


It was crazy back then, crazy good if you didn’t look too close. The music as a mustering-out call at first, then later in
the evening as wallpaper for the nighttime thrusts of a rumpled expatriate army whose soldiers never spoke of bolixed lives
and stained little souls. Upriver Sally was working in bronze and Hillside Dave was foundering in what he called his “Regressive
Matisse” period. Most of the rest were just talking about doing something—nothing small, understand—the “gonnas” per hour
roughly equaling the number of tequilas consumed. From any kind of distance at all, it looked like amoebas navigating a glass
slide, on the search for the nearest pile of food and being more or less content with what they found, mostly less. Less seemed
easier and didn’t require a reduction in beach time.


But none of that mattered unless you thought about it. And thought was to be restrained, if not suppressed, regarded as some
antiquity from a former world. A world from which all had fled… or had been released, depending on your charity and point
of view. Reflection or remembrance, any or all of that, pulled up things best left buried deep and covered over. Sifted through,
boiled down, flipped twice and double fried, it had become a simple place to be. A kind of perverted Darwinism, where the
flesh ruled but the species declined.


So it was: the music played and the people clapped. And the people danced and things were good for a while in the evenings.
In Puerto Vallarta, in a place called Mamma Mia.


Luz María and Danny went there almost every night except when the royalty checks were late coming from Danny’s New York agent.
In that case they’d lie around their grubby little place down on Madero and drink cheap tequila and screw their heads off,
which was sometimes even better than listening to Willie and Lobo. Or maybe something like Willie and Lobo—tight and practiced
and wild all at the same time. After living with Danny for two years, and starting even before that, Luz had willingly shed
most of the old strictures and hangups of village life, including Catholicism. That wasn’t easy, but once it was done, it
was done, and done full and pure and forever. That’s what Danny believed, or wanted to believe. Made things easier for him,
thinking that way.


As Danny said once, speaking with the kind of certainty coming from a ragged blend of drink and experience, there’s absolutely
nothing like a twenty-two-year-old Mexican woman who’s gotten herself liberated and opens up and starts screaming for Jesús
Christ to save her immortal Catholic essence while doing every single thing standing in direct contradiction with her words
and really meaning she hopes Jesús won’t take her now at this moment—maybe later, but not now—not now, with her body sweated
and her head tossing from side to side on the pillow and her slim, brown legs waving in the air or draped over the shoulders
of a gringo—Danny Pastor, in this case—who’s doing his best to put her headlong through the adobe at bed’s end and making
other superior efforts at seeing she at least spends time in purgatory, if she lucks out at all.


Anyway, on a soft, hot night in 1993, when the sewer system was having its own troubles south of the Rio Cuale, Danny and
Luz drifted up from Madero to hear Willie and Lobo. But the sound system in Mamma Mia wasn’t working up to expectations. That’s
what Lobo claimed and got sullen about it. After a while Willie started saying that, too. So Willie and Lobo took a long break
and went to work on it, broken speaker or some such thing. Luz and Danny walked down the street, dodging tourists and sailors
who’d come off an American military ship anchored in the harbor.


For no reason other than doing it, Danny pulled Luz into a hangout called El Niño. El Niño had big wooden shutters that swung
open on two sides, along the front where you could look west across Paseo Díaz Ordaz through exhaust fumes and see the sunset
on Banderas Bay, and also on the south side looking down on Calle Aldama, where street merchants held up fake silver bracelets
to the tourists sitting in El Niño because the guide books said that’s where tourists ought to go at sundown.


In the corner of the main room was a particular table where you could put your back against the wall and sweep the room and
see who came in, who was walking along Aldama on your left and what was happening out on Ordaz. On the night in question here,
with the bar crowded and people talking louder than conditions called for, that special table was occupied by a guy with neatly
combed, medium-length silver hair. He was wearing a blue denim shirt and khakis and sitting by himself, drinking a Pacifico
with lime. Had a photographer’s vest folded over and lying on the windowsill next to him.


Luz and Danny found two seats at the bar and were drinking straight tequila shots with lime plus the usual salt. Danny was
talking to the bartender about fish and sun and passing days, while Luz María moved her hand along his thigh—sometimes a little
higher when she thought nobody was watching. The touch of Luz María’s hand along his leg—and sometimes a little higher—got
Danny thinking maybe they ought to stumble back down to Madero and get crazy with love when he noticed the guy at the corner
table reach under his vest on the windowsill. Nothing too unusual about that. Later on, Danny couldn’t remember why he was
paying attention to the man or, for that matter, to anything at all except what Luz was doing along his leg.


Smooth and easy, but quick at the same time, the man checked the room, then lifted the vest a little. Had a gun under the
fold, some kind of automatic pistol with a noise suppressor on it. Nobody was watching this except Danny, far as he could
tell, since a mime was doing his thing across the street on the Malecón, the cement promenade along the sea, while a Maríachi
band was playing just behind the mime and sending out a high decibel count for thirty yards in all directions. Everybody was
concentrating on the show, including the waiters, while the bartender was tending to someone down the line. But Danny Pastor
was staring at this guy with silver hair, like he couldn’t believe what was going on was going on and sometimes still can’t
believe what happened actually did happen when he thinks back on it.


Up came the vest a little more, the gun still mostly covered, and the man’s hand jumped three times. No sound that Danny could
hear over the Maríachis. Just a slight bounce of his hand when he fired. He folded the vest double, stuffed it in a knapsack
sitting on the floor by his chair, and looked around. After scanning the room one more time, the man got up and laid out a
ten-peso bill, then made his way through the tables and went down the front steps to the street.


While Danny was sitting there temporarily immobilized and feeling like he’d just watched a short instructional film on audacity,
which ended without being finished, all hell broke loose out on Ordaz, the Maríachis cycling down a little at a time as they
figured out something had happened. First one trumpet peeled off, then two of the violins, then the second trumpet stopped,
and so on, until they ground down raggedylike and out of tune. They were all looking south along the street, and people were
running along the Malecón in the same direction as the band was looking.


Danny slid off his stool, the bartender asking, “Qué pasa?” Danny said he didn’t know what was happening but that he was going to find out. He walked over to the table where the shooter
had been sitting, leaned across it, and looked out in the street. People were crowded around a green Nissan sedan, and he
couldn’t see anything, so he went down the stairs of El Niño and out on Ordaz.


An American naval officer was lying on the cobblestones, his body twitching and blood coming from a neck wound. Danny, gut
tensed, walked past the officer, glancing down at him then quickly away. He went over to the Nissan, stepped on the back bumper
and looked over the crowd. Two Mexicans in white short-sleeves and white pants were holding snub-nosed .38s in both hands,
pointing them at the sky while they sweated buckets and looked all around with a kind of strange, crazy fear in their eyes.
A heavyset gringo in gray slacks and a resorty shirt was lying face up, with the bottom half of him on the street and the
upper half on four steps leading from the street up to the Malecón. Dead center in the gringo’s chest was a dark wet spot
and a pencil-size slice on his left temple where a bullet had grazed him was oozing red, and he was not moving even the tiniest
muscle from what Danny could tell.


Danny went back inside and told Luz and the bartender what he’d seen, mentioning also he didn’t think it was a good place
to be hanging around in general, not even for a minute and time to finish their drinks since the policía were arriving in waves of sirens and confusion. He figured they’d be up in the bar pretty soon, hassling everybody’s ass,
and he was also thinking he might’ve been the only one who saw anything, so he hustled Luz María out the back door and over
to Morales, heading south toward their place on Madero.


Danny was holding Luz’s hand and pulling her along pretty fast. She was half running to keep up with him and asking what was
going on, why he was hurrying this way. Probably some kind of premonition, but for reasons that weren’t clear to him, he wasn’t
ready to tell her the whole story, that he’d seen the hit. All she knew was some kind of shooting had taken place. She didn’t
know Danny had seen the shooter do it and that he was pretty sure he’d been the only one who saw it.


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. . .