Mr. Monk Gets Even by Lee Goldberg Read Free Book Online Page A

worked out fine for him. Ambrose fell in love with Yuki and ended up buying the motor home that we’d rented on the off chance he’d ever summon the courage to venture out again.
    “How long will you be gone?” Julie asked.
    Yuki shrugged. “Who knows? We’re in no hurry. Ambrose can write his owner’s manuals from anywhere.”
    “I can’t believe he’s going to do this.”
    “He hasn’t done it yet,” Yuki said.
    “He will,” Julie said. “He’s in love. Maybe you can finally cure him of his agoraphobia.”
    “It doesn’t matter to me. I’ll take him as he is,” Yuki said. “At least if he never leaves the house, I won’t have to worry about losing him.”
    Julie laughed. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
    “People adapt but they don’t change,” Yuki said. “They stay who they are. Anybody who expects anything else of a person is setting themselves up for disappointment.”
    “Ambrose is adapting a lot for you.”
    “I know,” Yuki said.
    “Mr. Monk would never do that. He doesn’t adapt for anybody,” Julie said. “He expects everyone else to adapt to him.”
    “He’s with Ellen Morse even though she sells crap.”
    “I wouldn’t say that he’s with her. They hang out. But that’s only because they don’t talk about her work at all. He pretends that side of her life doesn’t exist.”
    “So he’s deluding himself,” Yuki said. “That’s an adaptation.”
    “Or a mental illness,” Julie said.
    “We’re all a little crazy,” Yuki said, getting up again. “That’s what makes life fun.”
    “Or in the case of working for Mr. Monk,” Julie said, “a living hell.”
    “You’re beginning to sound just like your mother.”
    “Oh God, anything but that!” Julie said.
    She said that in mock horror, of course.
    At least I hope it was.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Mr. Monk and the Whale
    M onk would have preferred to go to a nuclear power plant, or slog through a sewer, or visit a trash dump, or even step into Ellen Morse’s Poop shop, than to walk into a hospital.
    That’s because hospitals are full of sick people, and he spent every waking minute of his life trying to avoid getting an infection or catching some horrible disease.
    Stottlemeyer refused to let him come in wearing a full-on hazmat suit with its own air supply, so Monk was forced to settle for scrubs, rubber gloves, a surgical mask, and protective goggles.
    He looked like a surgeon preparing to go into the operating room. But in his mind, he might as well have been a naked man walking into a village stricken with Ebola.
    The fact that he was there at all was a testament to the risk he felt Dale the Whale posed to society. Monk, Julie, and Stottlemeyer stood at the loading dock on the first floor, looking out at the street. They could hear the sirens of the approaching prison motorcade.
    “I don’t like this at all,” Monk said.
    “Really?” Stottlemeyer said. “I hadn’t noticed. You hide it very well.”
    “Letting Dale out of prison for any reason is a big mistake,” Monk said.
    “No pun intended,” Julie said.
    “Of course not,” Monk said. “I never pun. Why would I pun?”
    “Never mind,” Julie said. “Forget I said it.”
    “This is no time for puns,” Monk said.
    “You can relax. I’ve got officers stationed at every entrance and exit,” Stottlemeyer said. “Nobody comes in or out of the building, much less into the OR and recovery room, without getting screened. Besides, Dale is far too big to be snuck past anyone. It’s going to take a forklift just to get him into the building.”
    Stottlemeyer gestured to the forklift, which was on the other side of the loading dock, a cop at the controls.
    “He won’t need a forklift after all the fat has been removed,” Monk said.
    “He’s having hundreds of pounds of fat ripped from his body. It’s major surgery that could actually kill him,” Stottlemeyer said. “So it’s not like he can just leap off the table and run out of the