Page 39 of Cutter’s Lady

“Cutter!” Leslie gasped, too appalled to continue her campaign of silence. “Seriously? You aren’t actually going to drive this truck across that—that—”

“Bridge,” he supplied calmly, continuing to maneuver onto the narrow structure. “It’s called a bridge.”

“That is not a bridge. That thing barely qualifies as a catwalk!” Leslie suspected there were even models that would be scared to walk it. “You’re insane! The truck’s too heavy. It can’t take the weight. Cutter, stop!”

“It’ll hold, I think.”

“You think!”

“I checked it out. It’s still sturdy enough.”

“No! You can’t be sure. Go back.”

Cutter shook his head, keeping his eyes to the front. They eased onto the bridge. The wood planks creaked as the truck crawled across them. The roar of the river below them was intense. Leslie clenched her hands tightly together in her lap. Little trails of sweat trickled down her sides, but inside she was cold as ice. It wasn’t a wide river; they were halfway across. Going back was pointless now. There was nothing to do but endure it and pray that Cutter was right.

He was. After agonizing minutes, the truck rolled off the bridge and onto safe ground. Leslie sagged, releasing her pent-up breath in a burst. Even Cutter let loose a little sigh and paused to run his hand through his hair.

Leslie swung on him. “You are crazy! Certifiable! How could you risk that? Isn’t there any other place to cross that river?”

“Sure.” Cutter resettled the cowboy hat on his head and started forward again. “About ten miles south of here. This is the old bridge. But the new bridge has guards stationed on either end. You have to present your papers and let them inspect your vehicle.”

“You were avoiding a government checkpoint.”

“Right.”

“You almost got us killed to avoid a checkpoint?” Leslie’s voice rose incredulously.

“I did not almost get us killed. I’ve driven over that bridge twice before.”

“Oh, yeah, I could tell how sure you were of it. That’s why you got out and walked over it inch by inch first.”

“I believe in playing it safe,” he said with a shrug. “I wanted to make sure it hadn’t weakened since the last time.”

Leslie glared at him. “If you believed in playing it safe, you wouldn’t have used that bridge at all. You wouldn’t have that cargo in back. You risked both our lives just to smuggle in your lousy guns.”

“It’s not guns. It’s—”

Leslie threw up her hands. “I don’t care! I don’t want to know what it is. I just want you to dump it before we get caught and before you try something else insane!”

“Dump it! Now you’re the one acting crazy. Do you know how much that stuff costs?”

“I told you, I don’t care. You shouldn’t have brought it. You shouldn’t be carrying it on this trip.”

“We’ve gone through this before. I’m delivering my cargo. Period. I had a prior commitment to bring it. It was easier to do both at once.”

“Easier! Oh, sure, rattling around the countryside in the middle of the night, avoiding towns and army checkpoints, using decrepit old bridges—that’s a lot easier.”

“We’d be dodging the checkpoints and towns even without my cargo. You think the army would have let you waltz into the mountains? An American tourist? In guerrilla territory? Not likely. We’d have been detained, maybe more politely than we would be for what’s in the back, but the results would have been the same.”

Leslie stared. “Are you serious? You mean they’d have stopped me?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. This isn’t the U.S., lady. You can’t run around anywhere you want. You only go where the army lets you—or you sneak around the army. Why do you think they had those two guys tailing us? Not to watch us visit the ruins or get detained at the Castillez Bridge. To catch us if we tried to go around the army and into the mountains.”

Leslie was too stunned to speak. She sat back in her seat and stared in front of her. She was beginning to realize just how dangerous her plan to rescue Blake really was. She had known there would be physical hardships, and, of course, guerrilla fighters would not be easy to negotiate with. But she had never imagined that the San Cristóbal government might try to stop them, too. She hadn’t had any notion that they would have to dodge army units and checkpoints or cross primitive bridges in the middle of the night.

She suddenly wondered if her father had been right, after all. Had she been acting horribly impulsively ever since she came up with the idea to accompany Cutter? She normally researched things from every angle. She read every report about a property she was interested in before she even thought about going to see it, and once it had been properly vetted on paper she always went herself to look over every nook and cranny. Perhaps she could be forgiven for not researching the country where she sent someone she had hired. But why hadn’t she even opened Wikipedia before she’d decided to come along? Was there some reason that this endeavor made her so capricious or was she just becoming more like her mother the older she got? Or was it simply a case of not knowing any better? Maybe she had been too wrapped up in the cocoon of her upbringing, too used to the freedoms and safety of her home, to really understand what a country of revolution was like.

“What are the guns for?” she asked quietly.