William Boyd - Restless

'Sorry,' he said, letting air escape from his belly with a whispery wheeze. 'I was dying of thirst.' Eva noticed his voice was markedly less husky. 'Water doesn't work for me,' he added by way of explanation.

'There's been a problem,' Eva said. 'A delay.'

'Oh yeah?' He looked suddenly shifty, displeased. 'Nobody told me nothing.' He stood up, walked to the trashcan and dumped his beer-bag. He stood with his hands on his hips and looked around as if he were being set up in some way.

'I've got to come back next week,' she said. 'They told me to give you this in the meantime.'

She opened her handbag and let him see the money. He came over quickly and sat beside her. She slipped him the wad of notes.

'Two thousand. The rest next week.'

'Yeah?' He couldn't keep the surprise and delight off his face. He wasn't expecting money, she thought: what's happening here?

Raul stuffed the money in his jacket pocket.

'When next week?' he said.

'You'll be contacted.'

'Okay,' he said, standing up again. 'See ya.' He sauntered away. Eva waited five minutes, still checking for shadows. She walked up the main street and went into Woolworths, where she bought a pack of tissues. She turned down a narrow lane between the bank and a realtor's and immediately retraced her steps back up it at speed. Nothing. She did a few other manoeuvres, finally convincing herself that no one had or could have been tailing her, before going back to the Alamogordo and checking out – no refunds, sorry.

She drove back to the Mesilla Motor Lodge. It was dusk now and the setting sun was striking the peaks of the mountains to the east, turning them a dark-fissured, dramatic orange. Tomorrow she would return to Albuquerque and catch a plane to Dallas and make her way home from there – the sooner the better.

She ate in the hotel restaurant ordering a steak – tough – and creamed spinach – cold – washed down with a bottle of beer ('We don't serve wine, Mam'). There were a few other people in the dining-room, an elderly couple with guides and maps, a plump man who propped his newspaper in front of him and never looked up, and a well-dressed family of Mexicans with two silent, beautifully behaved little girls.

She walked along the walkway towards her cabin, thinking back over her day and wondering if Romer would approve of what her instincts had led her to do. She looked up at the stars and felt the desert air chill on her skin. Somewhere a dog barked. She checked the other cabins routinely before she unlocked her door: no new cars, all accounted for. She turned the key and pushed the door open.

The man was sitting on her bed, his thighs spread wide, his revolver pointing at her face.

'Shut the door,' he said. 'Move over there.' His accent was heavy, Mexican. He rose to his feet, a big burly man with a hanging gut on him. He had a dense wide moustache and his suit was dull green.

She moved across the room as he wagged his gun at her, obeying him, her mind frantic with questions, receiving no answers.

'Where's the map?' he said.

'What? Who?' She thought he had said 'Where's the man?'.

'The map.' He made the 'p' plosive. Spittle flew.

How could he know she had a map?

She noticed that her room and her suitcase had been searched, as her glance flicked about its four corners. Like some super-calculating machine her brain was running through the permutations and the implications of this encounter. It became clear to her almost instantly that she should give the map to this person.

'It's in the cupboard,' she said, walking over to it and hearing him cock his gun.

'I'm unarmed,' she said, gesturing for his permission to go further and then, when he nodded his head, reaching behind the loose partition and removing the map and the remaining 3,000 dollars. She handed them to the Mexican. Something about the way he took them from her, checked them and kept her covered made her think he was a policeman, not a crow. He was used to doing this, he did this all the time; he was very calm. He put the map and the money on the desk.

'Take your clothes off,' he said.

As she undressed she felt sick. No, not this, she thought, please no. She felt a horrible foreboding now: his bulk, his easy professionalism – he wasn't like Raul or the man in Albuquerque – it made her think that she was going to die very soon.

'Okay, stop.' She was down to her brassiere and panties. 'Get dressed.' There was no leering, no prurience.

He went to the window and pulled back the curtain. She heard a car start up some way off and approach the cabin and stop outside. A door slammed and the engine stayed running. There were others, then. She dressed faster than she had ever dressed in her life. She was thinking: don't panic, remember your training, maybe he just wants the map.

'Put the map and your money in the handbag,' he said.

She felt her throat swell and her chest tighten. She was trying not to think what might happen, to stay in the absolute here and now, but she realised the awful implication of what he had just said. It wasn't the map or the money he was after – he was after her: she was the prize.

She walked to the desk.

Why had she refused Romer's offer of a gun? Not that it would have made any difference now. A simple courier's job, he had said. Romer didn't believe in guns or unarmed combat: you have your teeth and your nails, he had said, your animal instincts. She needed more than that to fight this big confident man: she needed a weapon.

She put the map and the 3,000 dollars in her handbag while the Mexican went to the door. He kept her covered, opened the door and glanced outside. She shifted her body. She had one second and she used it.

'Come,' he said, as she was adjusting the combs that held her hair up in a loose chignon. 'Don't bother with that.' He linked arms with her, the snout of his revolver pressed into her side and they walked out to his car. Over at another cabin she could see the little Mexican girls playing on the porch – they paid her and her companion no attention.

He pushed her in and followed her, making her slide over behind the wheel. The headlights were on. There was no sign of the person who had delivered the car.

'Drive,' he said, looping his arm along the back of the front seat, the muzzle of his revolver now pressing into her ribs. She put the car in gear – the shift was on the steering column – and they pulled away slowly from the Mesilla Motor Lodge.

As they left the compound and turned on to the road to Las Cruces she thought he gave a sign – a wave, a thumbs-up – to someone standing in the shadows on the verge under a poplar. She glanced over and she thought she saw two men there, waiting by a parked car with its lights off. It looked like a coupe but it was too dark to tell what colour it was. And then they were past them and he told her to drive through Las Cruces and take Highway 80 heading for the Texas line.

They drove on Highway 80 for about half an hour. Just when she saw the city limits for Berino he told her to turn right on a gravel road sign-posted to Leopold. The road was in bad repair and the car bucked and juddered as she hit the ruts and the ridges, the Mexican's gun banging into her side painfully.

'Slow down,' he said. She cut the speed to about ten miles per hour and after a few minutes he told her to stop.

They were at a sharp bend in the road and the headlights lit up a section of scrub and stony ground crossed by what looked like a deep-shadowed arroyo.

Eva sat there, conscious of the adrenalin surge running through her body. She felt remarkably clear-headed. By any reasonable calculation she would be dead in a minute or two, she realised. Trust your animal instincts. She knew exactly what she had to do.

'Get out of the car,' the Mexican said. 'We're going to meet some people.'