Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants

by Goldberg, Lee

  She asked me how Mitch died. I told her how the navy fighter plane he was flying was shot down over Kosovo and how he’d been killed on the ground afterward.

  “Trevor isn’t a hero,” she said.

  “Mitch wasn’t either, except to me and Julie. The official story is that he was a coward, that he ran away from the crash scene, leaving his injured crew behind. I don’t believe that. I think his instinct would have been to save his men, and if he ran, it was to draw the Serb patrol away from his men. I’ll never know the truth about my husband. But you can know the truth about yours. Mr. Monk can find it for you.”

  Sharona chewed on her lower lip. “You believe Trevor, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “Sap,” she said. “I used to be just like you.”

  Sharona finished her coffee. I finished mine.

  “I guess I still am,” she said with a sigh. “I’ll ask Adrian to look into it as a favor to me. If Adrian thinks something is screwy about the case, then I’ll help him investigate and I won’t ever give up. But if he thinks Trevor is guilty, then I’m dropping it and so are you.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “And I won’t make it difficult for you if Mr. Monk decides he wants you back.”

  “I never said I’d take the job if he offered it,” she said.

  “He did,” I said. “And you would.”

  When Sharona and I showed up together at Monk’s door, he smiled with delight and relief and beckoned us in.

  “I knew you two would work it out,” Monk said. “You’re going to be great co-assistants.”

  “Co-assistants?” Sharona said.

  I’d forgotten to tell her about Monk’s brilliant plan for us to share the bliss of taking care of him.

  “You can divide up the responsibilities however you see fit,” Monk said. “For instance, when you work together, you could alternate who carries my water and who carries my wipes. It will be fun for you. Maybe even liberating.”

  “How about you liberate my husband from jail instead?” Sharona said.

  “You want me to plan a prison break?” he said.

  “I want you to prove he’s innocent,” Sharona said.

  “But he’s not,” Monk said.

  “We don’t know that,” I said.

  “She does,” Monk said, gesturing to Sharona. “And I have enormous faith in her instincts.”

  “I’m not so sure anymore, Adrian,” she said.

  “I am,” Monk said. “He’s guilty as sin. No, he’s even guiltier than that. He’s guilty as dirt.”

  “You don’t know anything about the case,” I said.

  “I have no doubt the police did a very thorough job. They should lock Trevor up, throw away the key and then forget where they threw it,” he said, “for the sake of humanity.”

  “You mean for your sake,” Sharona said, narrowing her eyes at him and putting her hands on her hips. “You want him locked up just so I can work for you again.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” he said.

  “What’s another way?” she said.

  He rolled his shoulders as if that act would put him and the rest of the world back into proper alignment.

  “That it would be really great if he stayed in jail and you worked for me again.”

  “That doesn’t sound any better, Adrian.”

  “Somehow it does to me,” he said.

  “We’re going to Los Angeles today, Mr. Monk. Sharona’s sister has agreed to watch Julie and Benji for us,” I said. “Captain Stottlemeyer talked Lieutenant Sam Dozier, the cop on the case, into meeting with us and going over the evidence.”

  “Los Angeles is hundreds of miles away from here,” Monk said.

  “Yes, Adrian, it’s going to require some travel,” Sharona said.

  “The flight is less than an hour,” I said.

  “I’m not getting on an airplane,” Monk said.

  “You had no problem getting on a plane and following me to Hawaii,” I said.

  “He followed you to Hawaii?” Sharona asked.

  “I was under the influence of mind-altering drugs at the time,” Monk said. “I won’t do that again. I don’t want that monkey on my back. I don’t even want to imagine a monkey on my back. Or any monkey anywhere. But it’s too late. There he is. I can see him. Now the filthy animal is in my head, and who knows where he’s been? Look what you’ve done and we haven’t even left the house.”

  Sharona sighed and looked at me. “Maybe I can take those drugs instead.”

  “We’ll drive,” I said.

  “Does anyone have a wipe?” Monk said.

  “What do you need a wipe for?”

  “My brain,” Monk said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Mr. Monk and the Long Drive

  Interstate 5 is a straight shot down the San Joaquin Valley in central California. It is so straight, you could almost take your hands off the wheel and drive with your feet.

  The scenery, like the drive itself, is monotonous and unchanging, nothing but flat stretches of baked farmland as far as you can see. There aren’t even any interesting towns or tourist attractions to visit. The only signs of civilization are the gas stations and fast-food outlets that are spaced about every thirty or forty miles.

  I’ve always wondered where the people come from who work in those desolate, out-of-the-way rest stops. When I was a kid, my dad told me they weren’t people at all, but zombies, living dead who chose to serve hamburgers for eternity rather than go to hell.

  I believed him. It’s not that I was a gullible kid. If you’ve seen the glassy look in the eyes of those cashiers, you’d be convinced, too. To tell you the truth, I’m not so sure he was joking.

  If you obey the speed limit and only stop for gas, it’s about a six-hour drive down to Los Angeles from San Francisco. But it’s easy to shave an hour off that by speeding. The good thing about a straight drive across a 250-mile valley is that there aren’t a lot of places for the California Highway Patrol to hide, and if the drive hasn’t lulled you into a zombielike stupor yourself, you can usually see the CHP plane circling the highway long before you get into the range of their radar.

  But speeding was out of the question with Monk in the car. Thank God for cruise control. I could keep the speedometer set at exactly sixty-four miles per hour. Yes, I know the speed limit is sixty-five, but it’s an uneven number and sixty-six would have made me a felon in Monk’s eyes.

  Sharona and I were in the front seat of my Jeep Cherokee. Monk sat in the back, directly in the middle. That may seem like a small detail to you, but it was a big thing for Monk. Before we left San Francisco, he’d insisted that we bring a fourth person along just to make the seating even and balanced.

  I refused.

  “Okay,” Monk said. “We’ll just have to pick up a hitch-hiker on the way.”

  “I’m not going to pick up a complete stranger just so you can have an even number of people in the car,” I said. “He could be an ax murderer.”

  “Hitchhikers provide a valuable service to society.”

  “You really think they’re riding along with you just so you have an even number of passengers?” Sharona asked.

  “Of course not,” Monk said. “They’re doing it to get from one place to another.”

  “It’s nice to know you aren’t completely disconnected from reality,” Sharona said.

  “And in return for the ride, they balance your car,” Monk said. “That’s the social contract. It really took off in the sixties. All the peaceniks were doing it.”

  “The peaceniks,” I said.

  “You know, give peace a chance. Make love not war. Gather in even numbers,” Monk said. “Those were some wild times.”

  “If you can get Trevor out of jail, then we’ll have four people in the car on the way back,” Sharona said. “Think of it as an incentive.”

  Monk insisted on bringing along enough food and water for a two-week stay, along with all the clothes, bedding, dishes a
nd silverware he’d need.

  It was a good thing I had a big car.

  Sharona and I each brought one overnight bag, a couple bottles of water, and a big bag of Cheese Doodles for us to share. I’m a firm believer that no road trip is complete without Cheese Doodles.

  The drive was going pretty well, everything considered, until we were within a few miles of Harris Ranch, seven hundred acres of feedlots teeming with a hundred thousand cows, all of them eating and crapping and waiting to die right alongside the northbound lanes of the interstate.

  You can smell the cows long before you see them. Monk began to squirm and gag the instant he caught his first whiff of those mountains of manure. It was as if all the oxygen had suddenly been sucked out of the car and he was suffocating.

  “What is that?” he croaked.

  “It’s a cattle ranch,” I said. “We’ll be past it in five or ten minutes.”

  “I’ll be dead by then,” Monk said. “We all will.”

  “Breathe through your mouth,” Sharona said.

  “What difference is that going to make?” Monk said with as much exasperation as he could manage while trying to speak without inhaling.

  “You won’t smell it,” Sharona said.

  “Get real, woman. You can’t smell radiation and it will fry you anyway,” Monk said. “Even if we survive today, our hair will start falling off in clumps tomorrow. Pull over. I have to get my gas mask out of my suitcase.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “In the time it would take us to pull over, rummage through your suitcase and get your gas mask, we could be ten miles away from here.”

  Monk took a handful of antiseptic wipes from Sharona and covered his nose and mouth with them. He closed his eyes, too, to protect himself from the sight of all those cows and all that manure. I wasn’t wild about the sight either, but as straight as the road was, I still couldn’t drive with my eyes closed.

  Once we were past the ranch and the smell, Monk drank about six bottles of Sierra Springs water to cleanse himself of the toxins, which soon created a new problem for him.

  “We have to turn around and go back to San Francisco immediately,” he said.

  “Why?” Sharona asked.

  Monk didn’t want to say. He rolled his shoulders. He shifted his weight. He squirmed.

  “I have to go to someplace private,” Monk whispered, ashamed, “to do something private.”

  “You have to go to the bathroom?” Sharona said.

  I glanced in the rearview mirror. Monk was blushing.

  “Great,” Monk said. “Now everyone in the car knows.”

  “I’m the driver,” I said. “I kind of have to know.”

  “Okay,” Monk said. “But that’s as far as it goes. It remains between us.”

  “We’ll stop at the next gas station,” I said. “There’s one coming up in five miles.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Monk said.

  “What were you planning to do, Adrian?” Sharona said. “Hold it the whole time we’re in Los Angeles?”

  “That was one option,” Monk said.

  “Even if we did turn around, you couldn’t hold it all the way back to San Francisco,” Sharona said. “Face it, Adrian. You have no choice but to use a restroom. Or a tree.”

  “This is a living hell,” he said.

  I was beginning to agree with him.

  Before going in the gas station restroom, Monk donned a hazardous-materials suit, complete with its own fan and air-filtration system. I’m not kidding. It was the kind of suit that the people from the National Institutes of Health wear when they’re dealing with an Ebola outbreak. He usually wears it to clean dog crap off his front lawn.

  Monk secured the area outside the men’s room with crime-scene tape and then began scouring the lavatory with the industrial-strength cleaning supplies he’d brought along.

  Usually, in a situation like this, I feel incredibly embarrassed and alone. And unless we happen to be with Captain Stottlemeyer, I also end up having to deal with all the people who are either pissed off or inconvenienced by whatever outrageous, bizarre or outrageously selfish thing Monk is doing.

  But not this time. With Sharona there, I finally had some support.

  Sharona treated the situation as if it was completely normal, and if anyone gave Monk a funny look, she gave them a hard stare right back, scaring them off.

  When the bewildered manager of the gas station came out to complain about Monk shutting down his men’s room and terrifying customers with his hazmat suit, Sharona handled the man beautifully.

  “Think about this a minute,” Sharona said. “The guy is cleaning your restroom for you and it isn’t costing you a cent. Do you really have a problem with that? Is it a job that you would rather be doing?”

  That was all the owner had to hear. He went back to his register and didn’t say another word to us.

  With the owner appeased, and Monk busy cleaning, disinfecting and presumably relieving himself somewhere in the midst of all that, Sharona and I got a hamburger at the Carl’s Jr. across the street.

  I couldn’t help wondering if my Super Star with Cheese used to be one of the cows up the road. But I was so hungry, I didn’t care.

  While we ate, Sharona and I talked about the difficulties of being a single parent and trying to take care of Monk at the same time.

  “It’s like being a single parent with two children,” I said.

  “At least this one cleans his room,” Sharona said.

  “And yours,” I said.

  I discovered that we had a lot more in common than I thought. It was getting difficult for me to keep disliking the woman, even if she was out to ruin my life.

  It took Monk about an hour and a half to do his thing and then we got back on the road. We got into Los Angeles around six p.m., and even though it was the height of evening rush hour, the traffic wasn’t too bad until we hit the Sepulveda Pass. That’s where the San Diego Freeway goes over the Santa Monica Mountains and down into the LA basin. Even with six lanes on each side, the freeway still wasn’t wide enough to handle all the cars. I’ve crawled faster than these cars were moving.

  Perhaps that was why everyone seemed to be driving an SUV the size of a house. They spent so much time on the freeway, it was like they lived there, so they figured that they might as well have all the comforts of home in their cars.

  The SUV in front of us had TV screens in the rear of the front-seat headrests for the viewing pleasure of the passengers in the backseat. Sharona and I were able to watch Entertainment Tonight and catch up on the latest important news.

  When we reached the top of the pass, we had a clear view of the LA basin and what we were breathing.

  Monk took one look at the thick brown layer of smog and put on his gas mask, which he must have taken out of his suitcase when he unpacked his hazmat suit.