Read Mr. Monk in Outer Space Online
Authors: Lee Goldberg
Mr. Monk in Outer Space (39 page)
“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.
“He was granting me my second-to-last request,” Monk said.
“What was your first?” I asked.
“That he would clean up the broken glass after he killed me,” Monk said.
“Naturally,” Stottlemeyer said.
“So what was the incriminating item he left in the taxi?” Disher said.
"His BlackBerry,” Monk said. “It slipped off his belt while he was sitting in the backseat. It had all the e-mails between him and Archie, photos of Lorber, and a diagram of the building in it. When he realized he’d forgotten it, he called it from a pay phone at the airport and Stipe answered. That’s how the hit man knew who’d found his PDA. He couldn’t take the chance that the cabbie or Stipe would scroll through his messages. So he told the cabbie to hold on to the PDA and then killed him when the man delivered it to him.”
Disher stepped up to Monk. “You did great work here today.”
“Thank you, Randy,” Monk said.
“How would you like to be a consultant to the Special Desecration Unit?” Disher asked. “We could use a man like you.”
“I’d be honored,” Monk said.
My bashed-up Jeep was evidence at a crime scene, so Stottlemeyer arranged for a patrol car to drop me off at home and to take Monk wherever he wanted to go. We got to my place first.
I was about to get out of the car when Monk touched my arm. It surprised me. Monk rarely, if ever, touched me.
“Did you really mean what you said tonight?” he asked.
“I’m afraid so,” I said. “Every fire hydrant in the city is covered in dog pee.”
“Not that,” he said. “Do you really need me?”
I looked at him and I thought about his question. But I realized it wasn’t something I had to think about. It was something I had to feel.
“Yes, Mr. Monk, I do.”
“Not just for a paycheck?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I’m a very needy person.”
“Me too,” he said. “Sometimes I think it’s not such a bad thing.”
“I think you’re right,” I said.
“I always am,” he said.
Don’t miss the next exciting book
in the MONK series!
in the MONK series!
MR. MONK GOES TO GERMANY
Available in July 2008 from Obsidian
Read on for a sneak peek at the next
mystery starring Monk, the brilliant
investigator who always knows when
something’s out of place. . . .
mystery starring Monk, the brilliant
investigator who always knows when
something’s out of place. . . .
It was a beautiful Monday morning, the kind that makes you want to jump onto a cable car and sing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” at the top of your lungs.
But I wasn’t in a cable car. I was in a Buick Lucerne that my father bought me when my old Jeep finally crapped out. It was only later that I discovered the real reason for Dad’s largesse. He’d actually bought the Buick for his seventy-seven-year-old mother, who’d turned it down because she didn’t want the same car that everybody else in her retirement community was driving. Nana was afraid she’d never be able to pick her car out from the others in the parking lot.
So Nana got a black BMW 3 Series and I got a car that my fifteen-year-old daughter, Julie, won’t let me drive within a one-mile radius of her school for fear we might be seen. Supposedly Tiger Woods drives a car like mine, but if he does, I bet it’s only to haul his clubs around on the golf course.
The day was so glorious, though, that I felt like I was driving a Ferrari convertible instead of a Buick. My glee lasted until I turned the corner in front of Monk’s apartment and saw the black-and-white police car parked at the curb and the yellow crime scene tape around the perimeter of the building.
I felt a pang of fear that injected a hot shot of adrenaline into my bloodstream and made my heart race faster than a hamster on his wheel.
Since I’d met Monk, I’d visited lots of places cordoned off with crime scene tape, and the one thing they all had in common was a corpse.
This wasn’t good. Monk had made a lot of enemies over the years, and I was afraid that one of them had finally come after him.
I double-parked behind the cop car, jumped over the yellow tape like a track star, and ran into the building. I was terrified of what I would find when I got inside.
The door to his apartment was open and two uniformed officers stood in the entry hall, their backs to me, blocking my way.
“Let me through,” I said, pushing past them to see Monk facing us. He was perfectly relaxed, his starched white shirt buttoned at the collar and his sleeves buttoned at the wrist. Believe me—for him, that’s hanging loose.
I gave him a big hug and felt his entire body stiffen. He was repulsed by my touch, but at least his reaction proved he was alive and well.
“Are you okay?” I stepped back and took a good look at him and his surroundings. Everything was neat, tidy, balanced, and symmetrical.
“I’m a little shaken,” Monk said. “But I’m coping.”
“What happened?” I asked, glancing back at the two cops.
They were both grimacing. Either they’d eaten something that disagreed with them or they’d been talking to Monk. Their name tags identified them as Sergeant Denton and Officer Brooks.
“I was burglarized,” Monk said.
“What did they take?” I asked.
“A sock,” Monk said.
“A sock?” I said.
“A left sock,” Monk said.
“There’s no such thing,” Officer Brooks said. “Socks are interchangeable.”
Monk addressed Sergeant Denton. “Are you sure your partner graduated from the police academy?”
“Maybe you just misplaced the sock,” Sergeant Denton said.
“I don’t misplace things,” he said.
That was true. His life was devoted to making sure that everything was in its proper place.
“When did you notice it was gone?” I asked.
“I washed my clothes in the basement laundry room this morning and brought them back up to my apartment to fold,” Monk said. “Then I heard the sanitation truck arriving, so I put on my gloves and boots and went outside to supervise my trash collection.”
Officer Brooks stared at him in disbelief. “You supervise your trash collection?”
“Don’t ask,” I said to the officer, then turned back to Monk. “So then what did you do?”
“I came back inside to resume folding my laundry,” Monk said. “And that’s when I discovered that I’d been brutally violated.”
“You lost a sock,” Sergeant Denton said.
“And my innocence,” Monk said.
“Did you look for it?” I asked him.
“Of course I did,” Monk said. “I searched the laundry room and then I ransacked my apartment.”
“It doesn’t look ransacked to me,” Officer Brooks said.
“It was a ransacking followed by a ran-put-everything-backing. ”
“Socks disappear all the time, Mr. Monk,” Sergeant Denton said.
“They do?” Monk said.
“Nobody knows where they go,” the sergeant said. “It’s one of the great mysteries of life.”
“How long has this been going on?” Monk asked.
“As long as I can remember,” Sergeant Denton said.
“And what’s being done about it?”
“Nothing,” the sergeant said.
“But it’s your job,” Monk said.
“To find lost socks?” Officer Brooks asked.
“To solve crimes,” Monk replied. “There’s some devious sock thief running rampant in this city and you aren’t doing anything about it. Are you police officers or aren’t you?”
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