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EIGHT CACHES LATER, Drake and Allie got to where they were consistently seeing little red hearts stamped on the geocache logs. There was little chance the red team was following the same cache order that Drake and Allie were, but Drake remained optimistic they’d encounter the other team within the next hour.
Three caches later, a smile crept across Drake’s face as he pulled up right next to the red team’s UTV.
“Look who we found. I wonder where they are.” Drake said.
Allie glanced at the handheld. “The cache is four-tenths of a mile to the northwest from here. Perhaps it’s down that hill.”
Drake left the vehicle and walked to the edge of the ridge. It resembled the one they had skipped earlier in the day, but this one was twice as steep but had a switchback path going down the side.
“Hey, you think you can handle this one?” Drake asked.
Allie joined him at the ridge and looked down the hill. “I think I could get down there and back up again, but to be honest, I’m not sure if my knee can handle the mile round-trip hike.”
“How’s the leg doing?”
“It’s throbbing on par with my heartbeat. I should take another pill.”
“Okay. That’s fine. We should take a break; let you rest up. Are you hungry? We could have a snack as well.”
Allie smiled. “I’d like that.”
“I hate to be a jerk, but I’d like to have a peek at their UTV. Could you stay here for a bit and be my lookout? Let me know if you see them coming?”
“Sure. No problem.”
The way the path cut into the ridge allowed Allie to walk a few feet down the trail and sit on the top of the ridge. It was like she was sitting on the top of a wall, so she got as comfortable as she could and scanned the area below her.
Drake, in the meantime, approached the UTV and started looking through it. He checked the storage compartment first. Inside was their backpack, two empty brown lunch sacks, and four bottles of water. He emptied the backpack and found all the same items he had in his, excluding the GPS, the map, the stamp, and a pen. Drake returned everything to the backpack and placed everything in the storage compartment.
Next, Drake checked the front of the UTV. He spotted the puzzle booklet standing between the two seats and grabbed it. He flipped through the booklet, scanned each page, then put it back.
“I can see them coming,” Allie called. “They’re a way off yet though. Hurry up with your investigation.”
Drake made sure everything was the way it was before he got there. He was about to leave when something caught his eye. He rushed to his UTV, grabbed his GPS, and snuck back to the red team’s vehicle to snap a picture. Drake shoved the GPS into his pocket, then retrieved a bottle of water, continued to where Allie was sitting, and joined her. He opened the bottle, then passed it to her.
“Thanks.” Allie took a drink and capped the bottle. “What are we doing now?”
“We’re taking a break. Enjoying the view.”
Drake watched the red team make their way to the bottom of the ridge. He estimated they had another hundred yards before they reached the start of the switchback trail.
“What are we really doing?” Allie asked.
“I found their puzzle booklet. They had every puzzle solved.”
“They must be smart.”
Drake looked at her. “No, they must be geniuses. Notice our booklet. We’ve got pages torn out, notes in margins, solutions scribbled out in places and reworked. Big X marks through the ones we couldn’t figure out.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So, they don’t. Their book is pristine except for the coordinates written in the expected place on each page. No notes, no false starts, no wasted ink at all. Not so much as a doodle.”
“You think they’re cheating?”
“Oh, I guarantee they’re cheating. Take a gander at this.”
Drake fished the GPS out of his pocket, brought up the pictures, and showed Allie the last photo he snapped.
“What is that?” she asked.
“That, my dear, is a charging cable for a smart phone.”
“How could they even get coverage out here?”
“That I can’t answer. When they get up here, I’m going to make some friendly geocaching small talk with them. While I’m doing that, you stay back and try to see if there’s anything in their pockets that looks like a phone.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Drake and Allie watched the red team ascend the slope. They got to their feet and moved to the top of the ridge as the men got closer to them.
“Hey, how’s it going?” Drake asked.
“Good,” one man said.
“You’re Will and Julian, right?”
“Julius.”
“How was the hike on this cache?” Drake asked.
As Will talked about the route they took to the geocache, Allie leaned against their UTV and sipped at her water while she studied the men. Will was an inch shorter than Julius. He had a cowboy’s frame and looked like he just stepped out of the May page of a cowboy calendar. His brown hair hung to just below his shoulders. His eyes, which were surrounded by crow’s feet from spending too much time in the sun, were ice blue. She noticed he had a small scar on the left side of his neck, and that stood out as a white blemish against his deep-tanned skin.
Julius had chestnut skin and dark eyes. He wore his hair in a closely shaved fade, and had a full mustache and beard, tightly trimmed. He looked like he had stepped out of the calendar as well, but she imagined him more like a Mr. September. Both were handsome, fit, trim, and polite, and they wore matching wedding bands on their left hands.
She had a straight-on view of Julius, so she took another drink of water and tried to appear disinterested as she looked him up and down. Allie blushed when he caught her looking at him and coughed and looked away when he winked at her.
She moved over toward her seat and sat down so her legs were hanging out and waited for a lull in the conversation. It appeared Will was the storyteller of the two, because not only did he go into great detail about finding the cache, he included a lot of hand gestures as he did so.
“Hey, y’all, I hate to interrupt, but can we eat, Drake? I need to take my pills and can’t do it on an empty stomach.”
He turned to Allie. “Of course. Right away.” Then he pivoted back to address Will. “I’m sorry, but I’m sure we can talk later tonight. I don’t want to hold you up anyway since you’ve probably got a lot of caches to find yet.”
Will nodded and slipped into the seat of his UTV without a word. Julius approached Allie. “I hope your leg gets better soon, ma’am. I broke mine once while busting a bronco. It was horrible. I was in a cast for an entire summer, and let me tell you, you don’t want to be on a west Texas ranch in a hot cast during the summer.”
Will interrupted. “Are you telling your broken leg story again? Get over here and leave those people alone. If you want to, you can bore them over dinner.”
Julius smiled, left Allie, and joined his partner. Allie watched the couple drive away while Drake retrieved the lunch bag. From inside, he extracted two chicken salad sandwiches and passed one to Allie.
“Well?” he asked as he reached into the bag and found the chocolate chunk cookies he was searching for.
“Julius has it. I think he thinks he caught me checking out his man-package, but I was really much more interested in the rectangle-shaped bulge in his pants pocket. He should know that when people wear jeans that tight, they can’t hide anything.”
Allie opened the sandwich and took a bite. The chicken salad was creamy, but not overly so, and had chunks of apple, red grapes, and pineapple in it, on fresh wheat bread.
“This is so good.”
“Yeah,” Drake agreed. “When we leave here, I’m going to miss the food. How many caches do we have left to go before we’re finished today?”
“About half. Fifteen, I’d guess.”
“You going to be up for them?”
“Sure thing. As long as my pills hold out, I’ll be fine.”
A warm breeze came up from the south. Drake closed his eyes and enjoyed the wind blowing through his hair. He had spent little time in the southwestern part of the country before, but he liked it. There was something about the wide-open spaces and the desolation that appealed to him somehow.
Drake and Allie finished lunch and cleaned up their site, and it wasn’t long before they were in pursuit of their next cache. Fortunately for them, the first seven were simple grabs, but the eighth involved a tree climb. Since Drake was too short to reach the bottom branch, he pulled the UTV next to the tree and scaled the vehicle’s frame to get started with his ascent. To encourage him, Allie acted as cheerleader and clapped and hooted as he scurried up the branches like a squirrel. After a quick search, he found the container, stamped the log, and joined Allie back on the ground.
On the way to the next location, Drake stopped at the foot of a large hill circled by boulders.
“How far from here?” Drake asked.
Allie checked the distance. “Just under three hundred feet.”
“Doesn’t look too steep. Want to give it a go?”
“Absolutely. I feel stiff and I need to walk around a bit. I might as well do it here.”
Allie passed Drake the GPS, then slipped out of the UTV. She didn’t want to use her cane, but she thought it was safer to use the extra support it afforded, and she certainly didn’t want to topple down another hill.
She took a moment to check her path, visually picking out the steps ahead of time she wanted to take, then started down. Normally something like the hill wouldn’t bother her, and three hundred feet would take her only two minutes at a leisurely pace. But as she took one tentative step after another, she recognized she wasn’t in her best condition. Even though she’d taken another pain pill, her knee throbbed, and she admitted to herself that she should have taken up Drake’s offer for a relaxing day by the pool. Allie needed rest, not a hike through the desert. Still, she trudged on.
“There’s a cairn up ahead,” Drake said.
“I see it.”
“Can you make it that far?”
Allie stopped and looked behind her. She’d walked more than halfway already. “I came this far, so I might as well finish it.” She put her head down and limped the entire way to the cache. Near the cairn was a boulder the approximate size of an easy chair, so while Drake unstacked the rocks to expose the cache container below them, Allie sat down with a grimace.
“It’s getting worse, isn’t it?” Drake asked.
Allie reluctantly nodded.
“Okay, that’s it then. You’re not getting out of the UTV for the rest of the day. If we can’t park within twenty feet of a cache, we’re not going for it, okay? Same goes for the competition. Unless you’re good, we should drop out. For us, the competition will be over, and we can consider the rest of the week a casual vacation.”
Allie shook her head in disagreement, but quit when she realized Drake was right.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “About all of it?”
“Of course. Look, it’s nuts trying to keep up this frantic pace. We’re already in the back of the pack anyway, so it would probably be impossible to catch up. And now that we figured out it’s the cowboys who are the team that’s cheating, the pressure is off as far as the investigation is concerned.”
Drake stamped the log, put it back in the container, and stacked the rocks into the cairn. He sat down on the rock next to Allie and rubbed her shoulder. “Let me know when you’re ready and we’ll start heading up. Take all the time you need.”
“I am ready. So, we can go now,” Allie said.
Drake took Allie’s cane from her. “Too bad. I’m not ready. I’m getting tired, too. And to be honest, I really don’t like that UTV. It’s only been a couple of days, and I feel like my spine turned to pudding. I don’t know how people ride these things every weekend.”
Allie smiled. “Those people probably say the same thing about us. They don’t know how we can spend our free time looking for film canisters in the woods and magnetic key holders in guardrails and on signs.”
Drake laughed. “Yeah, you’re probably right. Different strokes for different folks, right?” He handed her the cane. “If you’re really ready, we can go. No rush. I meant it when I said take all the time you need.”
“Help me up then. I don’t want to stay here all day. My leg will stiffen up, then you’ll have to carry me.”
Drake helped Allie to her feet, and they walked back to the UTV.
Two hours later, Drake pulled up to the hotel and helped Allie into the parlor. Once he got her settled in, he grabbed the tarp from the UTV and headed to the jail. He went through the door, saw T.R. in the communications room, and when she waved him in, he joined her. As he walked through the room, he handed her the tarp.
“What’s this?” T.R. asked.
“This was hanging in a tree, with rattlesnakes in it, waiting for an unsuspecting geocacher to pull it down.”
T.R.’s brow furrowed as she frowned. “You’re kidding? Was anyone hurt?”
“No, but it caused Geneva and Ingrid of the gray team to climb up a tree and wait for someone to come along to save them.”
“My goodness. Good thing you did.”
“No doubt. Are there any other teams back yet?”
T.R. picked up a clipboard and showed the page to Drake. T.R. had all the teams listed in alphabetical order by color, and all had a check mark in a box labeled out. No team had a check mark in the box labeled in. He handed the clipboard back to T.R.
“Team green is here.”
She winked at him. “No, you’re not. At least not until I get the call from Andy that you’ve officially checked in. Get it?”
Drake smiled. “Got it. I’ve got something else, too. I think the red team is the one you’re looking for. We caught up to them when their UTV was unattended. They had a phone charger in there, and their puzzle booklet had nothing in it but the coordinates for each cache.”
“What do you mean?”
Drake reached around and pulled his booklet from his back pocket and handed it to T.R. “Here’s ours for comparison.”
As she opened it, several pages fell to the floor. Drake picked them up as T.R. looked through the rest of it. “I don’t understand what you’re showing me here.”
“I’m showing you the work that went into solving the puzzles. See those pages that have scribbled out numbers? Highlighter marks? Code tables that were written out, then scratched off?”
“Yeah? So?”
“So that’s Allie and I, solving the puzzles. Their book wasn’t like that. They only had the answers.”
T.R. held out a sheet with only the north and west coordinates on it. “What about this one?”
“Allie worked that one out on a whiteboard, then wrote the answers on the page.”
“Couldn’t the other team have done the same?”
Drake shook his head. “No. You’re looking at over two hours of work there. They left the school after only thirty minutes. They would have had to do every puzzle in forty-five seconds to accomplish that. There’s another thing. Allie saw the outline of a cell phone in Julius’ jeans pocket. I’d bet my last dollar that they’re getting outside help.”
T.R. handed the booklet back. “I’ll look into it. In the meantime, you’d better go check in if you’re done for the day.”
Drake nodded and left the jail. He got into the UTV and drove it back to the barn. He parked in their assigned spot and unloaded his gear.
“You’re back early.”
Drake turned around and saw Travis standing there, socket wrench in hand.
“Yeah. I know. Allie’s not feeling well, so we only did the easy ones today.”
“She sick?”
“She sprained her knee yesterday, and all the bouncing around today didn’t help her much. Too many miles to cover on the rough road. Speaking of mileage, do you track these things?”
“Sure. Every day. Helps me keep a record of the maintenance schedule.”
“You mind if I see that?”
“Why in the world would you want to? Trust me, I check them every day before they go out, and again when they come in. They’re safe.”
“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply you’re not doing your job. It’s just that back home I keep a log of how many miles we travel when we’re geocaching, and I just realized I haven’t done that in the last couple of days. Come on, could you help me out?”
Travis shoved the socket into his back pocket. “You geocachers sure are strange, but come on, I’ll show you.”
Drake followed Travis into the office, where Travis produced a three-ring binder.
“How can I tell which one is mine?”
“There’s a sticky note on the page with the team color on it. I think I hear another team coming in. Come find me if you need anything else.”
“Okay, thanks, Travis.”
Travis left, and Drake opened the binder. Inside he found tabbed section dividers with numbers written on the tab, and Drake flipped it open to the first page. The first sheet of the section contained a page with the serial number of the UTV at the top, along with columns that showed the date, the mileage, and a line for comments. The third line on the sheet had the words ‘broken axle’ written in, and since it had no note with the team color on it, Drake assumed it was a vehicle not being used. He turned the page and saw a receipt and order slip for a new axle that apparently hadn’t arrived yet.
He flipped through the binder until he found the red team’s sheet, then found a spare sticky note and scribbled down the mileage for the last couple of days. Then he found the sheet for his own UTV and did the same. Once done, he set the notes side by side to compare the numbers.
“Holy cow,” he said. “There really is something rotten going on in the city of Cacheland.”
