Mr. Monk in Outer Space

by Goldberg, Lee

  “What evidence do you have that it was Archie?”

  “None at all,” Monk said.

  I gave him a look. “None?”

  “Not even a candy wrapper,” Monk said.

  “Then how are you going to prove you’re right?”

  “I don’t have to,” Monk said. “Archie is going to prove it for me. That’s why we’re here.”

  “How can you be sure it’s going to happen tonight?”

  “I’m not,” Monk said. “But eventually Archie and the hit man are going to meet.”

  “Eventually?” I said.

  “What else do you have to do tonight?” Monk said.

  “Eventually could be a very long time, Mr. Monk.”

  He shrugged. “It’s okay. I don’t have any other plans.”

  By ten p.m., I was crashing from my caffeine high and fighting to keep my eyes open. Monk’s idea of passing the time by singing “A Thousand Bottles of Windex on the Wall” wasn’t helping me stay awake either. Quite the opposite, in fact.

  Slumber was winning the battle for my mind and body when Monk nudged me hard in the side.

  “Archie is going on his rounds,” Monk said.

  I marshaled all the strength I had and bench-pressed one of my eyelids open. I saw Archie heading for the elevator.

  “Good for him,” I said and let my eyelid drop.

  I was instantly at Lake Como in Italy, water-skiing with George Clooney in front of his villa. I was behind his boat, effortlessly skimming over its wake, and he was at the wheel, but I could see his sparkling eyes and hear him perfectly over the roar of the motor.

  “You know what I love the most about you?” he asked with that confident, sexy grin of his.

  “My body?”

  “I adore that, of course,” he said, “but what I cherish is your neediness. I find needy women irresistible. I like to be needed. Especially by you.”

  “I need you, George,” I said. And then, through the magic of dreams, I was in his arms in the boat and he was leaning his face towards mine for a kiss that would change my life.

  “Eventually is here,” George said.

  “Oh yes,” I said.

  But he didn’t say it in that wonderful voice of his. He said it in Monk’s voice.

  I felt a stab of pain in my side. Someone was nudging me. Suddenly George’s boat became my Jeep and George became Monk.

  It was a major letdown.

  In my head, I asked Monk what was going on, but I think it came out as “Humblefliffendorf.” Maybe it was Dratch.

  Monk gestured to the Burgerville headquarters. There was a man standing at the employee entrance, running his key card through the scanner. He wore a long, tailored, black overcoat and a fedora that was pulled down low to shield his face from the security camera mounted over the door.

  On most people that outfit would have looked almost as ridiculous as a Confederation uniform. On him, it looked cool and menacing. He could have been George Clooney.

  Or maybe I was still half asleep.

  Before I could say anything, Monk bolted from the car and headed across the street.

  I tried to shake the grogginess from my head as I hurried after him.

  “What are we doing?” I asked in an urgent whisper.

  I don’t know why I was whispering. It just felt like the right thing to do. The fresh air, the chill, and the realization that we were running towards a hit man instead of away from one were waking me up fast.

  “Does your cell phone have a camera?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but the photos won’t win any awards.”

  “I only want to win a conviction,” he said.

  The hit man slipped into the stairwell at about the same moment we reached the employee entrance. He didn’t see us. Or at least I hoped he didn’t.

  “Shouldn’t we call the captain?” I asked.

  “We don’t have anything yet,” Monk said. “We’re in luck. The hit man wedged the door open with a stone.”

  “How is that luck? You aren’t actually intending to go in after him, are you?”

  Monk answered my question by going in after him. I stupidly followed and, in doing so, accidentally knocked the stone away. The door clicked shut with the finality of a prison cell.

  But Monk didn’t notice. He was over at the security desk, examining the video consoles.

  On the monitors, I could see Archie walking down the hallway on the fourth floor, checking the doors.

  “Our lucky streak is continuing,” Monk said. “These video feeds are being taped.”

  “I’m not seeing this streak,” I said.

  “We’ll have tape of Archie and the hit man together,” Monk said. “It’s evidence.”

  The man in the overcoat was slowly ascending the stairs and managing to avoid showing his face to the camera as he did so.

  “The hit man did a great job of hiding his face from the cameras the last time he was here,” I said. “And he’s obviously no less camera shy now.”

  “That’s what your cell phone camera is for,” Monk said. “You can get a picture of him when he emerges from the building and his guard is down.”

  “Won’t he see me?”

  “You’ll be in hiding.”

  “Hiding where?” I asked, looking around the wide-open lobby. There was a potted palm in one corner, but it wasn’t big enough to hide me.

  “Outside,” Monk said. “Behind one of those parked cars. He’ll never know you’re there.”

  “There’s one little problem with that plan,” I said. “We’re locked in. I accidentally knocked away the stone that was propping open the door.”

  Monk glanced at the desk and spotted a set of keys. “No problem.”

  He sorted through the keys and singled one out among the twenty on the ring.

  “This opens the revolving door,” he said.

  I studied the key. “How do you know?”

  “I can tell,” he said.

  “How?”

  “I recognize it,” Monk said. “I saw it when Archie unlocked the door before.”

  “But they all look the same,” I said.

  “Every key is unique,” Monk said. “That’s why they are called keys. You go outside and I’ll hide in the shredded-paper closet once I unlock it.”

  I took the key and looked at the monitors. The hit man was on the fourth-floor landing. He paused, reached into his jacket, and took out a gun.

  “This can’t be good,” I said and gestured to the screen.

  “We have to warn Archie.” Monk quickly checked the console until he found the button for the speaker system. “Where’s the microphone?”

  I pointed to a telephone receiver that rested in the console. “I think that’s it.”

  The hit man screwed a silencer onto the end of his gun. This definitely wasn’t good.

  Monk picked up the phone and flicked the speaker switch just as the hit man was about to step out of the stairwell into the hallway that Archie was patrolling.

  “Archie, this is Adrian Monk.”

  Both Archie and the hit man looked up at the sound of Monk’s voice. It’s instinctive when you hear a voice on a public address system, but if you think about it, it makes no sense. What do we expect to see? God floating over our heads? Then again, if Archie didn’t listen to Monk, that was exactly what he’d be seeing.

  “You are in mortal danger,” Monk said. “The hit man is in the stairwell and he has a gun.”

  What happened next happened amazingly fast. Archie turned towards the stairwell at the same instant that the hit man stepped out. Before Archie could react, the hit man shot him twice in the chest with the same cold efficiency he’d displayed when he killed Conrad Stipe.

  The hit man looked up at the monitor and brazenly showed us his face.

  I recognized him from one of the sketches Disher had showed us of the customers who bought Confederation uniforms.

  He smiled at us, turned, and headed for the stairwell again.
r />   I knew there could be only one reason he would risk showing us his face. He was going to kill us and take the tapes.

  “We have to go, Mr. Monk,” I said. “He’s coming for us.”

  I grabbed the keys again, ran to the revolving door, and unlocked it. But when I looked back, Monk was still at the guard’s desk. He hadn’t moved.

  “Mr. Monk, hurry up,” I said. “He’ll be here any minute.”

  Monk shook his head. “I can’t go through that door.”

  “You’ve done it before,” I said.

  “There were people to fill the empty spaces and the timing was precise. We don’t have those people tonight. Even if I tried, I’d never get through it before he gets here.”

  “If you don’t go through this door, you’re going to die,” I said. “It’s just a revolving door. You can survive this. You can’t survive a bullet in the head.”

  “Go, Natalie,” Monk said. “Call the police. I’ll stall him as long as I can.”

  “I’m not going to leave you, Mr. Monk.”

  Monk glanced at the screen. I couldn’t see the monitors from where I was, but I could imagine what he saw. The hit man was getting ever closer, moving slowly and methodically down the stairs.

  “You have a daughter who needs you, Natalie,” Monk said. “I have no one.”

  “You have me,” I said. “I need you.”

  “Run,” he said.

  I didn’t want to go, but he was right. I had to.

  “Please, Mr. Monk,” I said, my eyes filling with tears. “Come with me.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “It’s who I am. You have to go now, Natalie. He’s almost here.”

  I pushed through the revolving door and ran across the street to my car, dialing 911 as I went.

  But I couldn’t get a signal.

  I tried again. Still no good. I looked back at the Burgerville lobby as I got into my car.

  The hit man came out of the stairwell and walked up to Monk, who said something to him. The hit man replied.

  I couldn’t sit there and watch Monk get killed. I had to do something. So I started my car and peeled out of my parking space.

  As I was closing in on the lobby, the hit man raised his gun and pointed it at Monk’s head.

  That’s when I jumped the curb and plowed through the plate-glass window. Monk and the hit man dove out of my way. I smashed into the security desk, decimating it in a shower of wood and sparks.

  I looked out of my driver’s-side window. Monk was on the floor, dazed but alive.

  “Get in!” I yelled.

  Monk hesitated and stared at all the shattered glass. “You broke the window. It’s in a million pieces.”

  “Forget about that,” I said and glanced out the passenger side of my car.

  The hit man was dazed but okay, too. He stood up and started looking for his gun, which must have flown out of his hand when he fell.

  The gun was a few feet away from him, not far from the potted palm. He walked over to get it.

  “Get in the car!” I yelled to Monk.

  “Who is going to clean this up? Who is going to put all of this back together?”

  I looked back at the hit man. He bent over and picked up his gun.

  “For God’s sake, Mr. Monk, please get in the car,” I said. “Or we’re both going to die.”

  Monk picked up a piece of paper from the floor and used it to start sweeping up the glass.

  “This will only take a minute,” he said.

  I looked back at the hit man. He was standing beside my car now and aiming his gun at Monk.

  First Monk was going to die, and then me. I couldn’t watch this happen. I closed my eyes and said good-bye to my daughter. She was too young to have lost both of her parents. But she was strong. She’d make it somehow. She was a Teeger.

  There was a loud bang, which I found odd, considering that the hit man had a silencer on his gun.

  When I opened my eyes, Monk was still alive, brushing up the glass, and the hit man was lying across the hood of my car, staring at me with dead eyes.

  Who shot him?

  I looked to my right and saw Archie Applebaum standing outside of the stairwell, his gun held in both hands. The two bullet holes in Archie’s shirt were bloodless and I could see the blue of the Kevlar vest that he wore underneath.

  Archie lowered his gun and staggered up to my car. “Are you okay?”

  “It depends,” I said. “Are you going to kill us?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not a murderer. I just hired one once.”

  “Then I’m okay,” I said.

  Monk looked up at Archie. “Do you know where I can find a broom and a dustpan?”

  Monk finished sweeping up the glass into the dustpan I was holding just as the guys from the morgue zipped up the hit man’s body bag and wheeled it away. It was perfect timing.

  He smiled, satisfied with himself. “Everything is cleaned up.”

  “Including three murders and one desecration,” Stottlemeyer said, ambling over to us with Disher at his side. They’d spent the last hour or so interviewing Archie Applebaum. “You were right, Monk.”

  “Of course I was,” Monk said. “You should know that by now.”

  Stottlemeyer shrugged. “I follow the evidence where it leads me. That’s just how I’ve got to do things. I’m not big on blind faith.”

  “What did Archie tell you?” I asked.

  “That he’s never quite given up being a cop. Since he had the building to himself at night, he liked to snoop through the desks. One night he stumbled on the report that showed Lorber was fleecing the company and the employees out of their retirement,” Stottlemeyer said. “Archie knew that rich guys like Lorber never really do hard time and that he would get away with some of his fortune intact. But the little guys, the innocent victims like Archie, were going to lose everything.”

  “So Archie decided to make sure Lorber got what he deserved,” I said.

  “Archie wanted justice,” Disher said, “but he broke the law to do it.”

  “At least his heart was in the right place,” I said, then turned to Monk. “Right before I drove through the window, I saw you talking to the hit man. What were you saying?”

  “I asked him what he left behind in the taxi,” Monk said.

  “And he told you?” Disher said.