Puerto Vallarta Squeeze by Robert James Waller

not really caring at all about Luz or her family’s graves. Don’t take it and he’d piss off both her and the shooter. The shooter had put Danny in a hard place, and he didn’t like it, made him a little scarlet in the face.
    Danny turned half around and said, “We’ll go down to Ceylaya, Luz. Stop crying, for chrissake.”
    He gave the money back to the shooter. “Here, it’s your trip. The money we agreed on is enough.” Greed had its limits. Not often, but sometimes.
    In Escuinapa the shooter watched a señorita cross the street in front of them while they were stopped for a light. She was taller than most Mexican women and longer in the legs, in tight cutoff jeans and a peach top similar to a man’s sleeveless undershirt. Under the cloth her breasts swung pleasantly back and forth as she walked. Good-looking woman, long brown hair with copper highlights and almost Asian in her facial structure. She carried a plate of food, and the shooter watched her until she turned in a storefront.
    He looked over at Danny and grinned, little embarrassed kind of grin coming from the fact Danny had seen him watching the woman. He shook his head a bit, as if to say “Real nice.”
    Or maybe “It’s been a long time.”
    Or maybe “Wish I was younger.”
    As they moved along the street, the shooter turned and stared at the doorway where the señorita had disappeared. In the store window were steel tips for spear guns, ends for outboard motor gas lines, two mouthpieces for trumpets, camera, film, masks for scuba diving, handheld telephones, car and boat oil, flares, blank audiotapes, two flatirons, basketball, two soccer balls, compasses, padlocks, fishing lures, swimming goggles, car headlights, clocks.
    Danny turned west toward the sea while Luz was watching the shooter, who had watched the young woman in a peach top.
    Six miles down the road they crossed a long bridge across some kind of backwater. A village sat on the far side of the water, off to the right. In front of the third house along a dirt street was a cage under a banana tree, and whatever was in the cage prowled back and forth.
    The shooter saw it, too, pointing. “What’s that all about? The cage?”
    “I don’t know. Mexicans keep all kinds of animals for pets.”
    “Pull over. I’d like to see whatever it is up close.”
    To Danny, this was starting to feel like a tour. But what the hell. He swung into the village and drove up the dirt street, stopping in front of the third house.
    In the cage, brown spots on buff gray fur moved behind heavy wire. An ocelot, full grown, was pacing rapidly in a space only a little longer than its own body, barely room enough for it to turn around. And it was two short steps to one end, where it wheeled and took two steps back to where it had started in some kind of mindless protest, the sequence repeating over and over in an eternal journey taking it nowhere.
    Danny’s stomach turned just watching it; he could sense, feel, its desperation, a kind of impotent fury or raging agony or whatever feelings humans ascribe to animal behavior. Years before, he’d interviewed a zoologist who was on one of her tours talking about chimpanzees. In preparation for the interview, he’d done some reading on animal behavior and found that animals in captivity undergo change, were not the same animals they started out to be. It was bad enough in zoos, but in close quarters such as the ocelot’s cage, they went the human equivalent of insane. Danny mentioned that, and the three of them sat there for a minute looking at an ocelot no longer an ocelot, but something else, some creature existing nowhere else except in this village, in this yard, in this cage under a banana tree.
    “How much you think they’d sell it for?” The shooter’s eyes never left the animal.
    “The cat? You thinking of buying it?”
    “Yes.”
    “Then what?”
    “We’ll let it go. They’re almost extinct in this part of Mexico, all over, I guess. Read that