Mr. Monk on Patrol (21 page)

“They’re terrorists,” she said.

“And you’re just like the woman who took Toto away from Dorothy,” I said. “Only a lot heavier.”

I marched back to the car. Monk came up beside me.

“You weren’t very sensitive to her concerns,” Monk said.

“Like you were with the old lady and her dog?”

“That was different,” Monk said. “The old lady was perpetrating a crime but this woman was a victim.”

“Her tree was toilet-papered,” I said. “Big deal.”

“It’s harrowing. I know the terror from firsthand experience.” He stopped and looked me in the eye. “My trees have been toilet-papered. Not once, but many times. It’s like having a cross burned on your lawn.”

“It’s not the same thing at all,” I said.

“This is worse.”

“How is this worse?”

“It’s toilet paper,” Monk said. “Think about what it’s used for.”

He cringed. I got in the car. I realized that Monk was right about one thing. I was unusually short-tempered with Mrs. Dugoni. I realized it was because we’d completely skipped lunch in our zeal to enforce the law.

The gas station mini-mart where I’d bought myself breakfast the other day was only a block away, so I drove us over there. Just thinking about a Hot Pocket made my stomach growl loud enough for Monk to hear it.

He cringed again. He hates anything that reminds him that I have a body or that he does.

I pulled into the parking lot of the Low-P Gas Station & Food Mart.

“What are we stopping here for?” Monk asked.

“I’m getting a snack,” I said. “You want anything?”

“Perhaps a package of Wheat Thins,” he said. “Or Ritz Crackers and a bottle of Fiji water, please.”

He liked Wheat Thins because they were perfectly square and Ritz Crackers because they were perfectly round.

I got out and went into the mini-mart.

There was a different guy behind the counter this time. This guy was in his thirties, lanky, unshaven, and when I came in, his eyes widened to E.T. proportions. Cops have that effect on people. Even if you’ve never committed a crime in your life, you are bound to feel guilty of something when you’re facing a cop.

I smiled to put him at ease. “Got any Wheat Thins or Ritz Crackers?”

“Over there.” He gestured in the general direction of the rear of the store. Since there were only three aisles, that didn’t narrow things down much.

“Thanks,” I said. But as I turned to go down the aisle, I saw packets of Ritz Crackers right below the counter, along with several kinds of chips and candy.

I almost said something to the clerk about the crackers being right under his nose, but a twinge between my shoulder blades stopped me and kept me moving down the aisle and pretending I hadn’t seen them at all.

I went to the freezer, slid open the glass door, and surveyed the selection of Hot Pockets, but it was only a show. I didn’t care about the Hot Pockets anymore. My heart pounded hard in my chest and I began to sweat.

I stole a glance at a mirror up near the ceiling to my right. It was angled in such a way that the clerk could see what was going on in the back of the store. It also allowed me to see him watching me intently, occasionally
shifting his gaze to the storeroom door that was to my left. The door was ajar, and I could see someone’s foot, clad in a tennis shoe, tapping the floor nervously.

My throat went dry. It was as if the air had been sucked out of the place, the rest of the world had vanished, and all that still existed was that mini-mart, the guy at the counter, and whoever was in the storeroom.

I slammed the refrigerator door shut, hoping the action had drawn so much attention that nobody would notice that I’d unsnapped the clasp over my gun with my other hand at the same time.

I walked down the middle aisle where the cleaning supplies happened to be, grabbed a can of Lysol on impulse, and strode up to the front counter, my heart beating so rapidly that I thought it might burst out of my chest like that creature in
Alien
and run squealing out the door.

Relax, Natalie
.

I set the can of Lysol on the counter between me and the cashier and smiled at him like the friendly officer that I was. It was in that instant that I knew what I was going to do, though maybe on some subconscious level I’d known it before.

“Guess what—the Ritz Crackers are right here,” I said and pointed below the counter to a rack in front of me.

“Really?” the cashier said.

“Yeah, take a look.”

As he leaned forward, I picked up the can of Lysol with my left hand and sprayed him in the eyes. He shrieked and staggered back. With my right hand, I drew my gun and aimed it at the storeroom door.

“Drop your weapon and come out with your hands up,” I said to whoever was back there. In my peripheral vision I could see the cashier rubbing his eyes, tears
streaming down his face. So I sprayed him again to keep him occupied, eliciting another shriek and filling the room with a linen-fresh odor. But no one emerged from the storeroom. The only movement was that tapping foot.

“I am going to start shooting in three seconds. These are armor-piercing bullets,” I said. “What do you think they’ll do to that thin wooden door and your skull?”

They weren’t armor-piercing bullets, but I didn’t think whoever was behind the door knew that.

At least I hoped he didn’t.

And I hoped I’d sounded tough instead of silly. It’s not easy to deliver lines like that without sounding ridiculous. Clint Eastwood is probably the only guy who can get away with it. Even at eightysomething years old, he’s one scary guy.

Me at fortysomething, far less so.

The door opened slowly and a man came out, thin and jittery and sweating from every pore, his hands on his head.

As he stepped out, I saw that the man who’d waited on me the other day was on the floor behind him, wide-eyed and terrified, duct tape over his mouth and around his wrists and ankles.

Monk ran in then, his gun drawn, and saw me holding two robbers at bay with a Lysol can in one hand and a Glock in the other.

He smiled and nodded with approval.

“That’s what I call law enforcement,” he said.

We booked the two robbers at the station and we were on our way back to the squad room to write up our reports when Evie stopped me in the hallway.

“I was wrong about you,” she said. “You’ve got stones.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Evie looked at Monk. “You, I’m not so sure about.”

She continued on to wherever she was going and we continued on to the squad room, where we found Disher waiting for us.

“I just heard what happened at the gas station,” Disher said. “Fantastic job, Natalie. How did you know a break-in was going down and that the proprietor was tied up in the back room?”

“The cashier didn’t know where the crackers were,” I said.

“That was it?”

“And I had a twinge between my shoulder blades,” I said.

He pointed at me. “That’s what I was looking for. I told you that you had a cop’s instincts.”

“Did you hear about the Lysol?” Monk asked Disher.

“I did,” Disher said.

“That was her Monk instincts kicking in,” he said.

Disher nodded. “I have no doubt.”

“I do,” I said.

Monk looked at me. “Of all the items in the store that you could have grabbed, you picked the Lysol disinfectant cleanser. That’s significant.”

“I picked it because I knew it would sting his eyes but not cause permanent damage.”

“You picked it because it was the cleanest option,” Monk said.

“I’m proud of you, too, Monk,” Disher said. “Downtown Summit has never looked so organized. I’ve had dozens of calls.”

“People are grateful,” Monk said.

“Mostly they’re irate. But what matters is that you’ve shifted everybody’s attention away from Lindero and
Woodlake. By the way, the two of them are sticking to their story. They insist that Prosser is lying.”

“What possible reason would Prosser have to lie about being burglarized?” Monk asked.

“None,” Disher said. “Lindero and Woodlake are idiots. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before.”

“You inherited them from the previous chief,” I said. “They weren’t your hires. You were still getting settled in when the city hall corruption scandal broke. You never had a chance to really get to know your officers.”

“The chief is responsible for the actions of the officers in his department. There are no excuses. But at least there won’t be any doubt of their guilt. We served search warrants on their apartments and a storage unit that they’d rented outside of town. We recovered a truckload of electronics and jewelry. Our evidence room is stuffed with it.”

“Case closed,” Monk said. “You can put it all behind you now and look to the future.”

“That’s the good news,” Disher said. “Tomorrow I’ll put the word out on the cop grapevine that we’re soliciting applications for two new officers, though it’s going to be hard to top you two.”

“Thank you, Chief,” I said.

“Want a ride home for dinner?” Disher asked.

“We’ve still got some reports to fill out and then we have other plans,” I said. “Ellen Morse invited us over for dinner.”

“Cool,” Disher said. “You can ask her my question.”

“What question?”

“How much a meteor fragment pooped out by a dinosaur would be worth.”

“Oh my God,” Monk said. “How can you even imagine such a thing?”

“I bet it’s the Holy Grail of Poop,” Disher said.

“Do you know what the Holy Grail is?” Monk said.

“I know for poop it’s got to be a chunk of meteor fragment gobbled by a mighty T. rex and blown out of his dino-butt.”

“The Holy Grail is the chalice that Jesus drank from at the Last Supper,” Monk said. “So a Holy Grail of Poop would be a chalice of excrement.”

“Who says a Holy Grail has to be a chalice?”

“God says so,” Monk said.

“When did he say that?”

“When he didn’t say it was dinosaur poop.”

I smiled to myself and went to a computer to write up my report while they continued their ridiculous argument. It didn’t irritate me. Quite the contrary. I found it comforting, like an old, familiar song.

It wasn’t until I started working on my report and had to recount every detail of what went down in the mini-mart that I realized how dangerous the situation had been and how reckless I’d been. And then I began to think about all the other deadly ways it could have played out.

I looked up and saw Monk studying me. He’d already finished his report because he didn’t have as much to say. He’d been in the car and didn’t realize anything was amiss until he saw me, through the mini-mart window, draw my gun.

“Having second thoughts?” he asked.

“Hell yes,” I said. “What was I thinking in there?”

“You were thinking a robbery was in progress, lives might be in jeopardy, and you stopped it.”

“No, I didn’t think that. I didn’t think at all. I just had a feeling and I went with it.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Of course there is. What if my feeling was just acid indigestion, dry skin, or fatigue? What if the cashier was new or stupid and didn’t know where the crackers
were? What if the guy in the storage room was a legitimate employee? I would have assaulted a guy for nothing and aimed a gun at an innocent person. And what if that innocent person had, in fear, made a sudden move that I misinterpreted as aggression? I could have killed someone.”

“That’s not what happened,” he said.

“It could have,” I said.

“But it didn’t,” he said. “Your instincts were right. The place was being robbed.”

“Even so, what if the Lysol spray hadn’t temporarily blinded the cashier? What if the guy in the storeroom had come out shooting?”

“You would have shot back,” Monk said.

“Would I?” I asked. “And if I had, what if the proprietor had got caught in the crossfire? I didn’t even know he was back there until it was over.”

“But there was no shoot-out and no one was injured.”

“There could have been,” I said.

“You did the right thing, Natalie.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said. “Maybe instead of acting like Dirty Harry, I should have pretended not to see a thing, then come back out to the car and called for backup.”

“And it could have become a dangerous hostage situation instead,” Monk said. “And when we all stormed in, everyone could have been killed in the melee.”

“You don’t know that,” I said.

“You’re right, I don’t. But these dire hypotheticals are pointless. The fact is that you stopped a robbery in progress and subdued the assailants.”

I shook my head. “It could just as easily have become a bloodbath. I don’t know if I am ready for this.”

“Clearly you are,” Monk said.

“How can you say that?”

“Because you instinctively went for the Lysol.”

“I went for my gun,” I said.

“You went for the Lysol first,” Monk said.

“I could have shot someone,” I said.

“But first you disinfected the scene with Lysol, proving how levelheaded and conscientious you are. You have nothing to worry about.”

“So why don’t I feel better about this?”