Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse (21 page)

“You’ll never beat Lucas Breen,” Lizzie said. “You’re no match for him, button man. You’re out of your league.”

“What about you?” Monk said. “You think you’re in his league? You’re dancing on a bar. How long do you think it will be until he discards you like one of his monogrammed shirts?”

She and her partner each did a split, spun around, and slipped off the bar on the other side, leaving Monk dancing there alone.

The show was over.

The women went back to filling drinks and dancing behind the bar. Lizzie made a conscious effort to pretend Monk wasn’t there, which wasn’t easy. It’s hard to ignore a man standing on the bar.

Monk looked for a way to climb down without touching the countertop, but it wasn’t possible.

I elbowed the guy beside me. He yelped. “What was that for?”

“You know what it was for,” I said. “Move back, perv. He needs room to jump off.”

The guy and his tequila-soaked buddy moved aside. Monk jumped off the bar and landed soundly on his feet.

“I think I found my groove thing,” he said.

“I’m glad to know the night wasn’t a complete waste,” I said as we left.

 

 

 

 

The next morning Monk sat at the kitchen table and ate his bowl of Chex as if it were his last meal before his execution. And that was exactly what I said to him.

“At least an execution is quick,” Monk said. “I feel like a man condemned to a life sentence of hard labor in raw sewage.”

“This isn’t going to take the rest of your life.”

“It’s just going to feel like it.”

“I’m glad you’re going into this with a positive attitude,” I said. “What advice did Dr. Kroger give you?”

“He admires my dedication and sense of purpose. He said if I concentrate on the goal I hope to achieve, I won’t notice my surroundings.”

“That’s good advice. What did you say?”

“What if the goal I want to achieve is to get the hell out of my surroundings?”

Before we went to the dump, Monk made me stop at a medical supply store on O’Farrell that carried the kind of outfits those NIH doctors wear when they’re dropped into an African village to stop something like an Ebola outbreak or the Andromeda strain.

They outfitted Monk in a hard helmet with a large, clear face mask, and a bright orange jump-suit with matching heavy-duty gloves and boots. The outbreak suit, as they called it, also came with a self-contained breathing apparatus like firefighters and haz-mat people wear. By the time he was all suited up, Monk looked like the brightly colored offspring of an astronaut and a scuba diver.

I declined Monk’s offer to buy me the same getup. I figured whatever Grimsley had for me would be enough. Monk nagged me some more, but I told him if he wanted to give me something, he could give me the money he was going to spend on another silly suit. That shut him up.

When we got to the transfer station, Grimsley was waiting with jumpsuits, gloves, boots, hard hats, goggles, and air-filter masks for us to wear. His mouth dropped open when he saw Monk step out of the car in that outbreak suit.

“All of that really isn’t necessary, Mr. Monk.”

“Have you seen that mountain of garbage?” Monk said, his voice coming out of a speaker on his helmet.

“What I have here is really all the protection you’ll need,” Grimsley said. “We have an elaborate air-purification system, and we control airborne particulate matter by regularly wetting down the waste.”

“So we’re going to be soaked in garbage,” Monk said. “This nightmare gets worse every second.”

Grimsley handed me my stuff, and while I put it on over my tank top and sweats, he gathered together some paperwork he wanted us to sign. They were release forms absolving the sanitation company from liability for any injuries we might sustain, or illnesses we might suffer, from going through all that rotting waste.

Monk signed the papers and looked at me. “I bet you wish you were in one of these now.”

The truth was that I did, but I certainly wasn’t going to admit it to him. Once the papers were signed, Grimsley pointed to some shovels, picks, and rakes in the back of his cart.

“Feel free to use whatever tools you need,” Grimsley said. “Good hunting, Ms. Teeger.”

He actually tipped his hard hat. I was half tempted to curtsey.

“Thank you, Mr. Grimsley.” I plucked a rake out of his cart, handed it to Monk, then took one for myself.

I watched as Monk hesitantly lumbered toward the garbage. He stepped on a dirty diaper and screamed.

One small step for man, one major step for mankind.

I covered my nose and mouth with the mask, adjusted my goggles, and plunged into the garbage.

The first hour or two went slowly. I tried not to think too much about what I was doing or listen to Monk’s sobs. Things went a lot smoother for me once I decided to approach my work as a sociological exercise—to make something of a game out of it.

Instead of focusing on all the mundane, gross, and dangerous things I encountered (dead rats and other animals, junk mail, broken glass, decaying food, America Online CDs, soiled sheets, used razor blades, snot-covered Kleenex, curdled milk, etc.), I amused myself with all the interesting stuff people threw out: broken toys, porno tapes, vinyl records, love letters, magazines, scrap paper doodles, utility bills, canceled checks, well-read paperback books, yellowed family photos, business cards, empty prescription drug bottles, magazines, broken pottery, baby clothes, cracked snow globes, birthday cards, office files, shower curtains, those kinds of things.

If I found an unusual pair of shoes or a loud Hawaiian shirt, I tried to imagine the person who owned them. I read some of the discarded letters, skimmed some family photos, and examined a few credit card bills to see what other people were buying.

Every now and then I’d check on Monk, who’d be raking trash and whimpering, sounding like a depressed Darth Vader. One of those times, I looked up and saw Monk reaching for a big blue trash bag in the pile above him. He tugged at it, trying to pull it free. I saw right away what would happen if he succeeded.

I yelled to him to stop, but he couldn’t hear me through that damned helmet of his. I started toward him, but I was too late. He pulled the bag, fell on his butt, and an avalanche of garbage spilled on top of him, burying him in an instant.

I hurried over to him and clawed away the trash as fast as I could. I wasn’t worried about him smothering. I knew he had his own air supply. I was worried about him losing his mind.

I was frantically digging when I was joined by a half-dozen firemen in full fire gear, who started dragging away as much trash as they could. I glanced at the firefighter closest to me and saw the smiling face of Joe Cochran, a bandage on his forehead underneath his helmet.

“What are you doing here?” I said. I was never more relieved to see anyone.

“Making sure whoever killed Sparky doesn’t get away with it,” Joe said. “The rest of these guys are off-duty firemen who volunteered to help. We came in just as Mr. Monk pulled the trash down on himself.”

“You’re supposed to be recuperating,” I said.

“This is how I recuperate,” he said.

“Suiting up and slogging through garbage?”

“Hey, it was either do this or rescue cats from trees, chase purse snatchers, and make the world safe for democracy.”

“You’re wonderful,” I said. I could have kissed him right there, if my mouth weren’t covered with a mask and my hands weren’t full of rotten Chinese food.

“You’ve got that backward,” Joe said. “You’re the one standing hip-deep in gunk to get justice for a dog you never met. You’re the one who is wonderful.”

“Help! Help!” Monk’s muffled voice came from beneath the trash just a few feet away. The firefighters and I converged on the spot, and within a few moments we exposed Monk, who was clutching the blue trash bag like a life preserver.

Joe and another firefighter pulled Monk out, but he refused to let go of the blue bag.

“Are you okay?” I asked, wiping away eggs and chow mein and barbecue sauce from his helmet so I could see his face.

“I haven’t been okay since we got here,” Monk said.

“Is the overcoat in there?” Joe asked, motioning to the bag.

“No,” Monk said.

“Then what’s so important about that bag?”

“It’s my trash,” Monk said.

Joe looked at me. I shook my head and silently mouthed,
Don’t ask.

He didn’t, and we got back to work.

 

Monk put his blue bag in the back of the electric cart, took a few minutes to recover, and then, much to my surprise, joined us again in the trash.

Over the next few hours Joe and his men recovered a couple more of Monk’s blue bags and thoughtfully placed them in the cart with the other one.

I stopped only for bathroom breaks. I’d lost my appetite for lunch. Monk felt the same way.

But the firemen must have been accustomed to ugly tasks like this, because they had no problem taking a break to eat. They enjoyed their fast-food meals, undeterred by the stench of garbage all around them, and plunged right back into the city’s rotting waste afterward without any trouble digesting.

Joe worked the hardest of all. He was doing it for me, and for Monk, but mostly for Sparky.

I was glad he was there. But as happy as I was to have Joe’s company, his presence brought back that twinge of anxiety in my chest. I tried to dismiss it as simply the fear of beginning a relationship, but I knew it was more than that. I tried to ignore the feeling the same way I was ignoring the uglier aspects of our search.

It wasn’t working. I wondered if that was how Monk felt when he tried to ignore all the things in a case, or in life, that didn’t fit.

It was late afternoon when Monk called out, “Over here! Over here!”

We scrambled over to see what he’d found.

He lifted up an Excelsior napkin, pinched between two fingers and held at arm’s length from his body.

It meant we’d finally reached the trash from the bins outside the hotel. We all began digging with renewed energy and hope.

We dug up a lot more items that clearly came from the hotel—billing statements, broken dishes, banquet menus, pounds of table scraps, damaged linens, tons of those tiny little liquor bottles, even some clothes, but by five o’clock we still hadn’t found an overcoat.

Monk decided to call it quits for the day, and I was thankful. I was tired and I wanted to clean up before my date with Joe. And, let’s face it, our morale was pretty low.

We thanked the firefighters again for their help. I told Joe that I’d meet him at my house in a couple of hours.

As Monk and I were on our way out, Chad Grimsley came down to the floor from his office and asked if he could have a word with the two of us.

We got into his cart, the one with Monk’s trash bags in the back, and Grimsley drove us to the other end of the transfer station. He stopped at a roped-off corner of the facility with a sign mounted above it that read, ZONE NINE. RESERVED FOR THE CLEANEST TRASH ONLY.

Grimsley turned to Monk. “I believe your trash belongs here, sir.”

Monk stared at the roped-off area for a long moment and then did something incredible. He took off his gloves and offered his hand to Grimsley.

“Thank you,” Monk said.

“You can come and check on it anytime you like.” Grimsley shook his hand.

Monk put his gloves back on and, with a happy smile on his face, began unloading his bags and placing them behind the ropes.

“That was a really nice thing to do,” I said to Grimsley.

He shook his head. “Mr. Monk is a very special man. I have an inkling of the kind of demons he had to overcome to spend the day in tons of garbage. That’s worth something, Ms. Teeger, and it demands acknowledgment and respect.”

Grimsley motioned to the blue bags in the center of the newly christened zone nine. “That’s the least I can do.”

When Monk climbed back into the car, I could see contentment on his face. We hadn’t found the piece of evidence we needed to convict Lucas Breen, but at least some small measure of order had been restored.

 

 

 

 

Monk let me shower first, because he anticipated being in the bathroom for hours. In fact, he suggested that Julie might want to make arrangements with Mrs. Throphamner to use her facilities if the need arose.

When Monk went in to shower, I sat Julie down in the living room and gave her detailed instructions for the night. I wanted her to keep a close watch on Monk to make sure he didn’t remodel our house while I was gone and to call me if things got out of control.

“So you want me to babysit him,” she said.

“I wouldn’t put it like that,” I said. “I’m asking you to guard our house, our belongings, and our privacy.”

“In other words, you want me to perform babysitting
and
security services.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I have better things to do than watch Mr. Monk all night while you hang out with Firefighter Joe,” Julie said. “If I’m going to babysit, I expect to be paid. Six dollars an hour, plus expenses.”

“What expenses?”

“Things could come up,” she said.

“If you’re doing your job, nothing is supposed to come up.”

“Okay, six dollars an hour plus you kick in for a chicken delivery from the take-out place,” she said. “Unless you’d rather have Mr. Monk cook a meal in our kitchen without you here to supervise. Who knows what he might discover, rearrange, or throw out?”

She had a good point. When did Julie become so observant? I wondered. And when did she learn how to negotiate like that? She was growing up way too fast.