Puerto Vallarta Squeeze (15 page)

The shooter raised his head and looked directly at the cowboy’s eyes. “Don’t think so; not that I recall, anyway.”

“Thought I’d seen you before, somewhere, long time ago, ’Nam maybe.”

“Don’t think so.”

“Sorry to bother you.”

The cowboys went out on the porch, one of them talking in low, insistent tones to the other: “Jack, you’ve got to get your
head straight. Linda’s been gone a long time, and she ain’t comin back. Sharon’s gone, Linda’s gone, they’re all gone, ’cause
men like you and me are just too goddamn crazy to put up with.” One of the men coughed badly as they walked into the night
and climbed into a pickup. The sound of the truck faded as they headed out of Zapata and up onto the Durango road.

The shooter tilted his head toward the porch and said, “By what those two were saying, everybody’s going or gone.”

He took a drink of his Pacifico, then held up the bottle and studied it. “It’s almost impossible to overstate the medicinal
properties of beer.”

Danny stared at him and wondered how he could sit upright, let alone drink beer. Christ, he looked tired, face sagging. The
shooter took another hit of his Pacifico and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

“That guy seemed pretty sure he knew you,” Danny said.

“Remember him from ’Nam—First Cav or Seventh Marines, someplace—tough hombre, if I’m remembering right. Didn’t want to let
on I recognized him, though.”

There wasn’t much to lose now, no secrets anymore, so Danny asked him straight out, “This what you call settling messy accounts,
the whole business we’re involved in?”

Clayton Price smiled a little. “That was Puerto Vallarta. The rest of it’s just getting by and getting home.”

“How long you been at this?”

The shooter finished his beer, went behind the bar, and got himself another, talking while he did it. “Since I was… let’s
see, twenty-eight… after I got out of Vietnam and out of the marines.”

He returned to the table, riding on that easy, long-legged walk of his, and sat down, looking hard at Danny, who had the distinct
sensation an electric drill was headed for a point just above his nose, the Doppler effect of the shooter’s presence.

The shooter didn’t say anything for a moment, straightened the bracelet on his right wrist, looked at it. Then: “It’s a trade
you learn, like anything else. I picked up the basic skills in the military, long time ago. Some people make furniture, some
do what I do. It’s all a question of learning a craft and using tools.”

Clayton Price held the bottle of beer against his face. “I was a sniper, one of a handpicked group of men whose job it was
to harass the enemy. Legalized terrorism, in other words. We were good at it, too. One guy had ninety-three confirmed kills.
In one particular month he killed thirty people from long range, one-third as many as an entire battalion did operating in
the same area. The VC called him White Feather, after a feather he wore in his bush hat.” The shooter shook his head in admiration.
“I remember the time White Feather blew away one of Charlie’s ace snipers, put a round right down the other guy’s scope from
a few hundred yards out. Damn, he was good, the best.”

“How many did
you
have… kills?”

“Eighty-two, confirmed, couple hundred probables. The VC put a price on my head at about number fifty. Three years’ pay to
the man who got me.”

“What’s a ’probable’?”

“Meant there wasn’t any officer or NCO around to put their stamp of approval on it.”

’You killed eighty-two men in a war?” Luz almost whispered her words, shocked and disbelieving.

Clayton Price lit a cigarette and nodded, looked at her seriouslike. “Closer to three hundred. One at a time, and not all
of them were men.”

“Women, too?” She was incredulous.

He shrugged. “Sometimes children, if they were killing us in one way or another, and a lot of them did. They weren’t children
in the way you think of children. Charlie made them into full-blown soldiers, running around with grenades and bombs under
their shirts, You wouldn’t have heard too much about that, aside from the occasional massacre that made the news. Americans
are so bloody innocent, or pretend to be; they wave flags and want war, but they want war with rules. There are no goddamned
rules in the jungle. The Geneva Convention was a Stone Age document that had no relevance out there. Talk about contradictions—hollowpoint
bullets and shotguns were banned by the so-called Law of Land Warfare, but it was apparently all right if the VC skinned people
alive.

“And some of the women were more brutal than you can imagine. One in particular was famous for cutting off the genitals of
captured pilots within shouting distance of our compounds, then turning them loose. They’d run toward our perimeter wire,
naked, with nothing left between their legs and blood spurting like a faucet from where their genitals had been. So much for
the Geneva Convention and rules of war. We eventually got her. I shot her at seven hundred yards while she was squatting down
taking a pee. Her head exploded like a cantaloupe. Technically, four hundred yards is the maximum range for a sure head shot,
so I zeroed in on her chest, but she lowered herself a bit just as I squeezed the shot off. It was a tough, cruel game. No
quarter asked, none given. Still is, for that matter… still tough and cruel.”

Danny was silent for a moment, wondering about a woman’s head exploding like a cantaloupe, trying first to get the picture
in his mind and, once he’d done it, trying to get rid of the image. “What does a sniper do? How did you work? My only image
is one from old newsreels… Japanese with weeds sticking out of their helmets, perched in palm trees in the South Pacific.”

“Different now, though the mission is similar—create fear, create ambiguity and indecision, make people afraid to step outside
or poke their heads up.”

Danny tried to see him in his bush hat, in the jungle, all those years ago, this man sitting across the table in a Mexican
mountain village. He got the picture with no difficulty.

The shooter paused, lit another cigarette. When the bartender came back, he signaled her he’d fetched a beer while she was
out, making scribbling motions on his left palm to indicate she should put it on their tab. She got the message, then brought
three plates of beans, rice, tomatoes, and cold chicken to the table. Luz started eating. Danny’s stomach was feeling a little
dicey, listening to the shooter equate heads and cantaloupes, watching him dig a fork into refried beans.

“So you just drifted out of the military and into becoming a…” Danny couldn’t quite say it.

The shooter swallowed, smiled again, and filled in the blank. “A professional killer, you mean? An assassin, cloven hoofed
and all the rest?”

“Whatever you call it.”

“Don’t be afraid of the word—it’s called killing. I’m a sniper. From the guy with a crossbow in the bushes who knocked off
Richard the Lion-Hearted, to Leonardo da Vinci picking off enemy soldiers from the walls of Florence with a special rifle
he designed, to Jim the Nailer out in India, in the siege of the Lucknow Residency, we’ve always been here. We’re what rises
when things have gone too far, when law and politics have failed.

“There’s a lot of gray areas out there; you can be out of the military but still working for them or some government somewhere.
Civilians don’t like to believe that, but it’s true, You transcend into freelancing… people call you. Very little, almost
none, of my work has been the kind of thing you saw in Puerto Vallarta. That was a special project. Mostly I’ve worked as
a mercenary, a soldier-for-hire, wherever there’re bad guys.”

“How do you define ’bad guys’?”

“Anybody who’s not on my side.”

Danny thought about that for a moment, then continued. “Where have you worked?”

“All over. There’s always some nasty little war going on someplace. Or a remote drug lab in Colombia where the kingpin’s visiting
and somebody wants him taken out, things like that. Africa’s been especially good over the years, and Latin America, the Middle
East, too. I’m jungle trained, so I try to stay in those areas. Sniping is a specialty, that’s what they hire me for. Usually
to take out some general or politician. As I said before, same thing all snipers do: create fear, indecision, ambiguity—lock
the important creeps close to home, keep ’em from moving around. I was on a plane headed for Baghdad once, dressed up as some
kind of ambassador’s assistant. Except I had a disassembled rifle and fifteen rounds of match-grade ammo in the diplomatic
mail pouch. They called us back… don’t know why.”

He looked at the table, massaged his fingers. “That one would have been interesting. Insertion is relatively easy; extraction
is where it gets hairy.”

“You do any job, no matter what it is?”

“Most do, I don’t. I have my standards.” He stopped, grinned at Danny, then at Luz. “Sounds odd, doesn’t it, a professional
killer with standards? I don’t get much work for the American government because I won’t do a job without knowing the reason
for it. Usually they won’t tell you, but I won’t work blind and stand firm on it. Tell me the reason or call someone else.
That’s why I like mercenary work, soldiering-for-hire… you generally have some idea of why the hell the war’s being fought,
and you can decide to join up or not, depending how you feel about the issues at stake. And I don’t kill anything and call
it sport, ever… animals included. Killing is not sport, it’s killing, period, and I happen to do it for a living.”

“What kind of jobs would you turn down?”

“Some rich guy wants his wife out of the way so he doesn’t have to pay out big money when he divorces her. Or somebody’s just
mad at somebody else or wants a business partner removed. Things like that. For a few hundred bucks,

you can hire an eighteen-year-old ghetto kid to do that work. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making all of this seem honorable.
Not trying to justify it. It’s what I do, that’s all, and I do it my way.”

“What if somebody lied to you, about the reason for doing a job?”

“They know better than that.” He took a drink of beer, and Danny believed his words.

“I’m surprised you did the shooting in Puerto Vallarta from such a public place as El Niño.”

“Ordinarily I wouldn’t. There’s no code of honor in this business about how the job gets done. Do it at long range if you
can—as we used to say in ’Nam, long range is the next best thing to being there. Long range, and in the back if possible.
But never in public, not if you can help it. I’d been looking for that guy for a couple of weeks and was running out of time.
I was sure he was still in Puerto Vallarta, but he was lying up somewhere and I couldn’t find him. Suddenly he was there,
getting out of a car right on the main drag. So, tying all of it together, it’s a matter of getting a little old and getting
a little careless and sometimes not giving a damn anymore for some reason. Plus not having any other choice if the job was
going to get done.

“I think I’m slipping a bit. Also, there’s a lot of new high-tech weaponry out there I don’t have easy access to and don’t
know how to use—night-vision glasses, sophisticated explosives. I’m pretty much a specialist, an old-time gunman, never have
known much about explosives other than a few basic things. I’m starting to feel obsolete, like I’ve been flying close to the
sun for a long time. Thinking now and then about closing down.”

“The naval officer was a target, too?”

“Uh… that was something else; let’s say he was a secondary target.”

“Why were you sent to kill them?”

Clayton Price had finished his supper, and the blue gray eyes with dark circles under them looked at Danny, then down at the
Pacifico beer. Luz had gone off to the rest room and the bartender was sitting on the porch, out of earshot.

“I have some things to tell you. “You think it’s been rough so far? It could get a lot rougher before this is over, so it
seems like you ought to know the whole story. Not sure why, just seems that way.” He looked off in the direction Luz had gone.
“For her sake, maybe.”

Danny took a drink of his beer and said nothing.

“The civilian I killed in Puerto Vallarta was preparing to sell computer secrets to a Taiwanese industrial consortium, something
to do with something called failure analysis, some kind of sophisticated computer simulation of why things go wrong. The military
is very interested in this technology. American business firms are hot on it, too. It’s one of the next technological frontiers,
and one of the few areas where Americans are ahead of the pack. When one of the big defense firms got its budget whacked in
the current wave of military cutbacks, a number of high-ranking engineers were laid off. One of them was the civilian in Puerto
Vallarta. He’d decided to pick up a tip on his way out and was selling what he knew about failure analysis to this Taiwanese
group. His payoff was in the big millions, that was the rumor.

“The hit was contracted for by a branch of the U.S. government, not sure which one. There was a go-between, of course… there
always is, but it smelled
government
right from the start, and I confirmed that before I signed on. I wasn’t the only one hired, there were two or three other
freelancers, that’s how bad they wanted him. At least one other contractor was in Puerto Vallarta, saw him sitting in a bar
one night. Knew he was a shooter. There’s an old Russian proverb, ’A fisherman sees another fisherman from afar.’ All of us
were given carte blanche, go where we had to go, do what we had to do. We each were guaranteed a flat amount of money plus
a bonus for the man who got the job done—bounty hunters.

“I was told the transfer of information might take place in Mexico, and I tracked this engineer to Puerto Vallarta. Couldn’t
find him once I got there. I knew he was going to meet someone soon, but I didn’t know where or when. I was just sitting in
El Niño one night, and there he was.”

“But you had your gun under your vest on the windowsill. “fou must have had some idea he was going to show up.”