Mr. Monk on the Road (29 page)

When I saw the huge, mud-caked boots again on the steps of the Zarkins’ motor home, I could vividly picture the big man who’d worn them. He wasn’t a drunken, tattooed, neo-Nazi, devil-worshipping, ex-convict monster. He was a man with a broad smile on his face and two buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken in his arms. Now I wanted to confront those old hags as badly as Monk did.

I looked at Monk. He looked at me.

“Let’s take ’em down,” I said.

Monk nodded and pounded on the door. Bessie opened it with the same sweet smile on her face that she’d had the first time she’d greeted us.

“Why, hello there. What a delight to see you both again,” she said. “Won’t you come in?”

I hesitated, but Monk bounded right in. “Sorry for arriving earlier than you expected.”

Gertie and Mabel were standing in the galley. Gertie was glaring at us, her arms crossed. Mabel seemed dazed, unwilling to look either one of us in the eye. But Bessie was all smiles.

“I’m afraid we’re fresh out of brownies to offer you,” Bessie said.

“You didn’t even save some for your son?” Monk said. “Or is he still having engine troubles with his truck?”

That’s when I remembered that Bessie had mentioned her son when we’d first met:
He’s out on the road, jamming gears on an eighteen-wheeler like his dad used to.

That’s how they could be in two places at once. The old ladies did the killings in California while Bessie’s son murdered the construction worker in Arizona ... and then tried to kill us on Route 66.

“My God,” I said. “You’re a family of murderers.”

“And they collect souvenirs from their kills,” Monk said, motioning to the display case. “Bessie’s son brought the boots out to them in Victorville to add to their collection, which, as you can see, includes sand dollars from Santa Cruz and gumballs from San Luis Obispo.”

“Aren’t you the clever one,” Bessie said.

“He’s not clever,” Gertie said. “He’s just irritating.”

I walked up to the display case. There were dozens of knickknacks in there. If each one represented a kill, then these little old ladies and their son were responsible for a shocking number of murders all across the country.

“This is how you stay young, by killing people?” I said.

“It’s thrilling,” Bessie said. “The adrenaline keeps your heart pumping and your nerves firing.”

“There are other ways you can get that without killing people,” I said.

“Spoken like someone who has never done it,” Gertie said. “Nothing packs the same wallop.”

“I killed a man once,” I said. “In self-defense. I didn’t enjoy it.”

“Like sex, the first time is never much fun,” Gertie said. “But it gets much better with practice.”

“How many years have you been doing this?”

Mabel shrugged. “I’ve lost track. But when you get to be our age, you start forgetting lots of things.”

“You remembered enough to have a guilty conscience,” Monk said. “And that’s what led you to make your big mistake. When we told you where we’d been, and that I was homicide consultant to the San Francisco police, you wrongly assumed that we stopped by to say hello because were on to your murder spree and wanted to engage you in a cunning game of cat and mouse.”

Now it all made sense to me. They’d misinterpreted everything we’d said that night, reading hidden meanings into our words that existed only in their minds.

“So when I told you we were going to the Grand Canyon, you thought we knew what Bessie’s son was doing, too,” I said. “That’s why you sent him to kill us.”

“But you did,” Mabel said. “You knew all about him.”

“No, we didn’t,” I said.

“You mean you
guessed
that he was a drunken, tattooed, neo-Nazi ex-convict?” Bessie said.

Wow
, I thought,
I am good.

“So you’re saying that he’s not a devil worshipper, too?” I said.

“Of course not,” Mabel said. “Shame on you.”

“Now you’re just trying to piss us off,” Gertie said.

They may not have been devil worshippers, but these women and their lovely son were worse than any of the bad guys in
Race with the Devil
.

It wouldn’t have surprised me one bit if they had a cauldron in the back of their motor home and black, pointy hats.

“Sending him after us was your big mistake,” Monk said. “I would never have stopped wondering why that trucker was so intent on killing us or how he knew where we were going to be. I would have figured it out. I always do. But, to be fair, I might not have put everything together so soon if we hadn’t heard about the barefoot construction worker getting killed in a hit-and-run.”

“And saw his other pair of boots,” I added.

“This all makes for a nice campfire story to scare the kiddies with,” Gertie said, “but that’s all it is. You can’t prove anything.”

“We can prove enough,” Monk said. “And I know how we can prove the rest.”

“Good luck with that,” Gertie said, and showed us to the door.

“Your days of killing are over,” Monk said. “Tomorrow you’re retiring to prison. Sweet dreams.”

Monk walked out and I followed, backing out, so I could keep my eyes on the old hags in case one of them decided to come after us with a meat cleaver.

Gertie slammed the door behind us.

“That felt good,” Monk said as we walked away.

“I’m glad you enjoyed it, but I’m not sure what you accomplished besides letting them know that we are on to them.”

“They already knew that,” Monk said, “or thought they did.”

“Now they can start covering their tracks.”

“They could have started yesterday, but they didn’t. They thought their son would do that for them. And they can’t do much about that now.”

“They can ditch those souvenirs,” I said.

“They won’t. They mean too much to them. Besides, tossing them out here wouldn’t do them much good. All we have to do now is keep our eye on them until Captain Stottlemeyer gets here in a few hours.”

“I’m not sure we can wait that long,” I said.

“They know they are finished,” Monk said. “They are resigned to their fate.”

“They don’t strike me as people who resign,” I said. “They strike me as people who kill.”

“Those days are over now,” Monk said. “Weren’t you paying attention to the conversation?”

“What did you mean when you said you didn’t have all the proof but you knew where we could get the rest?”

“I’ll show you,” he said.

Monk led me past our motor home, waving at Ambrose in the window to let him know that everything was fine, and continued on to Dub’s RV.

Yuki opened the door as we approached.

“You’re just in time. Dub has just finished preparing our martinis,” she said, then smiled at Monk. “And one refreshing glass of Fiji bottled water for you.”

We stepped in, and Dub stood up to greet us from the captain’s chair he’d been sitting in, the oxygen tank at his side. “Greetings, my friends. What news do you have from the road?”

He barely got the words out before he lapsed into a brutal coughing jag that doubled him over. Yuki put her arm around his shoulder and lowered him back into his seat, gently stroking his back and comforting him until he caught his breath again.

Monk crouched in front of him and looked him in the eye. “I’ve got the ending to the story that you’ve been chasing. It’s all over, Dub.”

“Oh, thank God.” He wheezed, his eyes bright despite his deathly pallor.

“I’m lost,” I said.

“Dub is a reporter,” Monk said.

“Yes, I know that,” I said.

“The story he’s been investigating is a string of unsolved killings across the country,” Monk said. “He believed that they were connected and although he couldn’t convince anybody that he was right, he has been doggedly following the trail for years. But it wasn’t until the last week that he’d finally zeroed in on the killer and was only a few days behind.”

“How did you figure that out?” I asked.

“His bumper stickers,” Monk said. “They are from the same states that are colored red on the back of the Zarkin motor home.”

“Dub knew he was on the right track when he saw that the famous detective Adrian Monk was on the same trail, too,” Yuki said.

So Dub had made the same mistaken assumption that the old women had. They all thought Monk was on the case. The only people who didn’t think so were Monk and me.

I looked at Dub. “Why didn’t you tell us what you were doing two days ago?”

Yuki put her hand on Dub’s, signaling him to relax and that she would answer my question.

“Dub wanted to find the killer himself. It was going to be his last, big story. The evidence is all there.” She gestured to the file boxes in his bedroom, and I saw the gun beneath his bed. “Dub knew he was getting close, but he was afraid he’d die before he found him. If that happened, I was to take all the evidence to you. But it didn’t. Dub got his man.”

“He’s here.” Dub started coughing again. Each cough was deep and sharp, stabbing him in the chest like a butcher knife.

“
They’re
here,” Monk said. “It’s not just one killer. It’s four. Three old women traveling in a motor home and one of their sons, who drives a big rig.”

Dub’s eyes went wide. “No, no.
He’s
here.”

I felt a sudden chill.

“The truck,” I said. “Are you saying that it’s here, in the camp?”

“It’s parked back in the trees,” Yuki said, “at the far end of the grounds. He arrived a few hours ago.”

I had a bad, bad feeling about this.

“Stay here,” I said, and went for the door.

“Where are you going?” Monk asked.

“There’s got to be a phone or a radio in the front office,” I said. “I’m calling the park rangers.”

I ran out of Dub’s trailer and across the dark campgrounds to the small trailer at the front gate. I peered in the window. The attendant was asleep at his desk, his face in an empty cake pan.

I opened the trailer door, rushed inside, and tried to shake him awake. But he was out cold.

That’s when I saw the chocolate crumbs on the plate and understood why he’d had that silly grin on his face before.

He was high.

I looked for his radio, knowing with dread what I’d discover when I found it.

The radio was on a shelf above the desk.

And my worst fears were confirmed. It was dead, the wires ripped from the back of the unit.

There was only one reason they’d drug the attendant and disable the only means of communication out of the camp.

And that could mean only one thing.

I bolted from the cabin and was running back across the grounds to Dub’s RV when I heard the diesel growl of the engine and saw the headlights flash on, like a monster awakening and opening its eyes.

I looked over my shoulder just as the truck burst out of the trees in an explosion of leaves and dirt.

And it was coming for me.

I dove out of the way, and the truck rumbled past, so close I could smell the hot rubber on the tires. But instead of coming back around, the truck kept on going, horn bellowing with rage, hell-bent on snaring its prey.

I scrambled back to my feet, yelling Ambrose’s name and running toward our RV, but my cries were drowned out by the wail of the truck’s horn and the roar of its engine.

Ambrose heard it, too. He stood in the open doorway of our motor home, terrified of what was coming, but more terrified of stepping out.

“Jump!” I screamed, still running. “Jump!”

But I knew that Ambrose couldn’t and wouldn’t, and that the truck would smash into the motor home, obliterating it and sending the pieces into the river below.

I kept on running and screaming even though I knew it was futile, that there was no way I could stop the nightmare that was unfolding in front of me.

The truck charged ahead, only seconds away from impact, when there were three ear-splitting gunshots in rapid succession.

A tire blew, the windshield shattered, and the truck veered away from our motor home and kept on going like a runaway train, broadsiding the Zarkins’ RV and blasting through it like it was made of Styrofoam, the momentum propelling both vehicles into the river below.

I turned and saw Monk standing outside Dub’s trailer in a firing stance, backlit by the light in the window, the smoking .357 Magnum still aimed in his hands.

He could’ve been Dirty Harry, if Harry wasn’t dirty.

Monk slowly relaxed his stance and rolled his shoulders before dropping the gun. He held his hands out to me as I approached him.

“I need a wipe,” he said.

No, he definitely wasn’t Dirty Harry.

He was Clean Adrian.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

C
aptain Stottlemeyer and Lieutenant Devlin arrived just as the four body bags were being carried up from the river to the morgue wagons. The campground was illuminated by portable lights that drew thousands of bugs that were bedeviling the police officers, forest rangers, and forensic investigators who were everywhere.

I sat in our motor home with Ambrose and Monk, but I would rather have been with Dub and Yuki, sipping my third martini. After what I’d been through, I needed something stronger than Fiji water.

Stottlemeyer and Devlin approached our RV, stopped for a moment to take note of the forensics team that was photographing the dents and scrapes and taking samples, and then came inside.

“Hello, Captain,” Monk said. “Thanks for coming all this way.”

“I see I arrived late for the party,” Stottlemeyer said, and then introduced Lieutenant Devlin to Ambrose and vice versa. “It looks like a tornado touched down here.”