I had no choice but to accept his account, but I was having trouble adjusting my mental picture. From the outset, I’d taken for granted the fact that the blackmail scheme had been set in motion by the discovery of the tape. Either the tape wasn’t discovered that day or Stringer knew nothing about it.
Feeling unsettled, I trotted down the stairs to my car. My immediate concern was Fritz’s whereabouts. He reminded me of Pinocchio. As clever as he thought he was, he was gullible, likely to fall into bad company. If his goal was to be liked? Hand over twenty-five thousand bucks and see how popular you are. From his perspective, he’d solved the problem. Once the twenty-five grand was paid, that would be the end of it. He could call it a loan if he liked, but his chances of getting the money back seemed minuscule. Not that it would matter to him. He was probably having fun. He’d outmaneuvered his parents, outwitted the bank, and everything had gone as planned.
It was time to see if I could run him to ground. Being a big fan of the obvious, I decided to start up at Yellowweed since that’s where he was headed at last report. As a place to transact off-grid business, the abandoned campsite was isolated and therefore offered privacy. If Fritz had gone up there with this guy on Friday, why hadn’t he come home? Maybe the original plan was to get him up there and relieve him of the money. The guy must not have realized how pointless cunning was when Fritz was so eager to hand over the cash.
I stopped off at a service station and topped off my tank on the way to the 101 and then I headed for the pass. As I wound my way up the mountain, I could see the turkey vultures wheeling in the sky overhead. I counted four of them, their wings held in a shallow V, occasionally tipping from side to side, which caused the flight feathers to look silvery in the late afternoon light. The turkey vulture forages by smell, which is apparently uncommon in the world of birds. Flying low to the ground, they’re capable of picking up the scent of gasses that herald decay in dead animals. The turkey vulture feeds on carrion, looking at road kill as life’s perpetual banquet.
I parked at the side of the road, pulling my Honda in close to the rising hillside. This must have been roughly the spot where Troy had parked his pickup truck the night Sloan was killed. I started the climb. The Boy Scout camp at Yellowweed had been deserted for years. The trail was overgrown and I was probably wading through poison ivy that would net me a nasty rash later on. The signs along the trail were faded, some posts broken off at the midpoint, leaving a ragged bouquet of splinters. As is usually the case, the hike made me conscious that I was out of shape. The aggravating thing about exercise is that it prepares you solely for the one you’re engaged in. Biking, hiking, running, or lifting weights—the activity conditions you for that activity, but not necessarily for anything else.
At the summit, where the ground leveled out, I stopped and took stock. At first glance, I had no way to guess if Fritz and his pal had been here. Visitors usually accessed the area by way of the old gravel road, which in drought conditions such as ours would yield no tire prints. A fine haze of dust had settled on the scrub brush, but it might have been there for months. I counted eight more vultures congregated in the trees, which were otherwise bereft of leaves. The dry weather had created a premature change of season and the foliage had dropped without ceremony.
The vultures occupied the lower limbs of a stand of trees fifty yards away. Branches sagged under their weight. Some hopped awkwardly across the bare ground, picking their way as far as the foundation of one of the cabins leveled long ago. Two of them waddled on flat feet, making hissing and grunting noises, as graceless as penguins on dry land. One stood with wings spread, drying his feathers, his legs streaked with white as though he’d defecated on himself. It was clear the meeting had been called to order, but the minutes hadn’t been read. The buzzards had gathered in anticipation of a tasty snack, but nothing was forthcoming. In consequence, they seemed ill-tempered and out of sorts. I kept an eye on them, hoping they wouldn’t regard me as a canapé.
On closer inspection, I could tell someone had been here recently. Wood had been gathered and piled to one side. I could see the remnants of a campfire that had been doused with water. When I checked with my bare hand, the ashes were cold. There was a flattened spot where a tent had been erected. The tent stakes had been driven into the hard ground in the shape of a hefty square. Various scuffle marks suggested that the tent had been taken down and stowed in some form. I’m not a camper, so I don’t really know how these things are done. A palm frond had been used as a makeshift broom before it was tossed aside. A fine sweep of dirt formed a fan shape, but there was no way to judge what had been there before.
A large plastic trash bin had been dragged into the clearing. Someone had tossed in a plastic grocery bag loaded with empty baked bean cans, the packaging for hot dogs, and an empty cellophane wrapper for the hot dog buns. They’d rounded out this wholesome repast with a bag of Fritos, also depleted. I was starving to death and found myself staring wistfully at the wrappings from a packet of moon pies.
I walked the periphery of the campsite. No empty beer cans. No rolling papers or joints. I wasn’t sure what they’d done to amuse themselves. A number of the old cabins had been bulldozed and the construction debris had been used to fill the old swimming pool. The concrete rim looked like the edging for an Olympic-sized flower bed. I could almost hear the nine-year-old boys shrieking as they did cannonballs off the side. The “fill” was a treacherous-looking tangle of old fencing and broken-up lumber where the cabin remnants had been pushed into this final resting place. There must have been an argument about the virtues of removing the rubble versus leaving it where it was, but since the twice-abandoned campground wasn’t slated for further use, economic imperatives had prevailed. The pool was tucked in among the ancient trees, so the sunlight wouldn’t have penetrated far and the surface of the water would have been subject to slime where falling leaves rotted.