Puerto Vallarta Squeeze Read Online Free PDF

regular people were turning in for the night. Whatever had happened was none of their business. So what if a couple of rich gringos were down on the cobblestones. If it wasn’t bullets, it’d be AIDS or dope or booze. A lot of them came here, running away from something back home and toward a sleazy, inelegant end in the white enclaves of Puerto Vallarta. For the Mexicans it was something to talk about at work tomorrow, but not important in the day-to-day scheme of surviving poverty and feeding the family.
    Back down the years, someone had installed a roll bar in the Bronco, and the shooter was hanging on to it with his left hand, smoking Marlboros with the other, knapsack between his feet on the floor and staying quiet. Danny moved along an arroyo in four-wheel drive and suddenly there was Route 200. He stopped short of the highway, let Vito idle, and walked up on the road. A federate station sat just north of the airport. They were a mile north of the station, parked in a riverbed, with the traffic looking normal along the highway. If there was a roadblock, which Danny guessed there was, it must have been closer in to the city, probably at the federate outpost. The Bronco climbed up the riverbank, rolled over broken glass, and hit the pavement. Danny took it out of four-wheel drive, and they headed toward el Norte, windows down and the breeze beginning to dry the sweat on Danny’s face and everywhere else.
    Danny talked to the shooter without looking at him. “In about an hour I’d like to know which border town you want. If we’re heading straight north toward Nogales, I’m going up a coast road for a while. It takes a little longer, but we’ll avoid some of the heavy truck traffic around Tepic. Otherwise we’ll curl back southeast toward Guadalajara and catch the roads up to Laredo or El Paso or Brownsville.”
    The shooter’s flashlight bounced around as he studied the map. “According to what I’m seeing here, we don’t have to make the decision that early. Looks like another east-west road further north. Comes out of Mazatlan and heads over to Durango.”
    “Yeah, but it’s a horror story. Some guy once counted the curves between Mazatlan and Durango. Claims there’re thirty-three hundred of’em. Also lots of falling rock up in those mountains, all kinds of small boulders lying on the highway, bandidos on top of that. But it’s your nickel.”
    The shooter said nothing. They blew up the middle of Bucerias and then past the turnoff to Punta de Mita, where Luz and Danny used to swim naked at night and sometimes in the afternoons before Japanese fat cats started in on it with their fences and bulldozers and condo blueprints.
    A little farther north, Luz poked him in the shoulder and shouted over the wind, “Guamúchil.” Danny nodded and thought of the little village off in the jungle. A woman in Guamúchil made tortillas the old way, by hand, rice-paper thin and filled with hot salsa. She cooked them on the top of an oil drum cut out and laid over a circle of rocks with a fire underneath. Luz and Danny had gone there once, bought a handful of the tortillas, and walked through the jungle, eating them and sucking on wild limes. Danny had wanted to see a boa constrictor, but they hadn’t found any. Boas are hard to get a fix on, that’s what someone told him. “You have to know their habits and watch the overhead branches.
    An hour later Danny pulled off the road a kilometer south of Las Varas. They sat there in darkness, big stars on the other side of the windshield, Vito idling like a slow coffee grinder with teeth missing. He turned the ignition key. Dead quiet except for crickets in the background and the riffle of night breeze around them.
    “Which way?”
    The shooter was looking at the map again, using his little flashlight. He folded the map, stuck it under the seat, and lit a cigarette. “Let’s hold off on the choice for a while. Take that coast road you were talking about, the one with