Mr. Monk is a Mess (16 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Mr. Monk Goes Bananas

I
’d seen the gun before. It had belonged to Dub Clemens, the journalist that Yuki was working for when we met her on the road. And Monk had actually fired the gun to save his brother’s life. But my familiarity with the weapon didn’t make it any less unsettling to have it pointed at me.

“You can put the gun down,” I said. “You’re among friends.”

She gestured with the gun to Irwin. “Who is he?”

“My mailman.”

“We prefer the term
letter carrier
,” Irwin said.

“Why did you bring him?” she asked.

“It’s complicated,” I replied. “The longer we stand here, the more likely we are to draw attention, and I think that’s the last thing you want.”

She stood up, but kept her gun trained on the open door. “Okay, you can come in, but do not open the door all the way, and lock it behind you once you are inside.”

We slipped in one by one and she kept the gun aimed at the door in case some unseen assailant used the opportunity to dash in and kill her. I closed the door and locked it.

“Don’t turn on the lights or open the blinds,” Yuki said, putting her gun down on the dining table and taking a seat. The only light in the RV seeped in from around the edges of the blinds and the drapes across the windshield. But even in the semidarkness, I could see that she was exhausted. “How did you find me?”

I explained it all, then tried to reassure her. “I don’t think you have to worry about anyone else finding you the same way we did. Nobody but Mr. Monk would ever notice the blinds.”

“I hope you’re right,” she said.

Irwin and I sat down across the table from Yuki, and Monk stood, his arms crossed, striking a very judgmental posture.

“Who were those men who attacked you and what do they want?” he asked.

“They want the money I took from them and then they want me dead.”

“Me, too! I’ve got exactly the same problem,” Irwin said. “We’ve just met and we already have so much in common. Do you like to crochet?”

Yuki looked at me. “Who
is
this guy?”

“Irwin Deeb,” I said, and then I told her my story of woe and stolen cash. When I was done, she just shook her head.

“Aren’t we a lovely bunch,” she said.

“But only one of us is a convicted felon,” Monk said.

“Not true,” I said.

“And a killer,” he said.

“Again, not true,” I said.

“You’re reformed,” Monk said.

“Maybe she is, too,” I said and turned to her. “All we know is that you embezzled a million dollars from Juanita Banana Company.”

“And killed someone,” Monk quickly added, just in case I’d forgotten.

I gave Monk a sharp look, which I am not sure he could see in the dim light, and then turned back to Yuki. “Could you fill in the blanks for us?”

Yuki sighed. “I was an idealistic computer hacker living in St. Louis. I thought I could change the world with a few keystrokes. Juanita Banana paid the Marxist death squads in Urabá, Colombia, over a million dollars in protection money. It didn’t matter to Juanita that the guerrillas were using that money to kill thousands of civilians, crush labor unions, and drive peasants off of their land. All that mattered to them was keeping their business running smoothly. So I hacked into Juanita’s payroll system and stole a million dollars, which I dispersed to dozens of human rights organizations to even the score.”

“So Juanita alerted law enforcement and you became a fugitive from justice,” Monk said.

Yuki laughed. “Juanita didn’t call the police or the FBI, because that would have generated unwanted publicity and scrutiny. They called their own death squad, Blackthorn Security, the same people the U.S. government hired to commit their ‘extraordinary renditions,’ which is a ridiculously docile term for outright illegal kidnappings committed on foreign soil. One of those lovable Blackthorn guys attacked me on the street as I was coming out of a coffeehouse. I fought back, he lost his footing on a piece of uneven sidewalk, and I pushed him in front of a bus.”

“This is why I keep saying that cracked sidewalks are a hazard,” Monk said.

“Really?” I said. “Because you might trip while attacking a woman and fall under a bus?”

“If that sidewalk had been properly maintained, that man wouldn’t be dead,” Monk said.

“But I would be,” Yuki said.

“You’re missing my point,” Monk said.

“You could learn a few things from Ambrose about empathy,” Yuki said.

“He could learn a few things from me about not fornicating with tattooed, killer biker chicks.”

Irwin looked at her. “Does this mean you’ve got a boyfriend?”

“Yes,” she said.

“But we’ve got this amazing connection,” he said.

“So what did you do after the guy was hit by the bus?” I asked her, eager to keep the conversation on track.

“I stuck around and waited for the police.”

“You did?” Monk said.

“Of course I did,” she said. “What kind of person do you think I am?”

“A tattooed, killer biker chick,” Monk said.

“I wasn’t any of those things at the time. I was an A student studying computer science at community college, I didn’t have a single tattoo, and I drove a Ford Escort. I was an upstanding citizen who’d fought off an attacker. Naturally, I stayed because if I’d bolted, that would have been irresponsible and made an act of self-defense into a crime.”

“It was,” Monk said.

“The hacking was, technically speaking, but what happened to that Blackthorn agent was an accident. He brought it on himself. I figured, wrongly as it turned out, that no jury would ever convict me for that,” she said. “Besides, I thought the police were the only ones who could protect me from Juanita Banana and Blackthorn.”

“This is such a cool story,” Irwin said. “It’s
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
, except with bananas instead of Nazis.”

“Didn’t Juanita’s actions in Colombia come out in the trial?” I asked. “It might have justified your actions.”

She shook her head. “The judge ruled that bringing that issue into trial was prejudicial or irrelevant or some other crap and my public defender was too inexperienced to do anything about it. I was convicted of embezzlement and involuntary manslaughter and sent to prison. Juanita didn’t even get a slap on the wrist.”

“But they didn’t get their money back,” I said.

“That’s because I refused to tell them where I’d sent it and I’d wiped all of my electronic footprints,” she said. “But they were convinced I had it stashed somewhere. I knew they’d be waiting for me when I got out. So I looked at prison as another college and took unofficial courses in self-defense and falling off the grid.”

Yuki went on to say that she changed her name and her appearance when she got out of prison and went to ground, emerging only to take a job working as journalist Dub Clemens’ assistant. Clemens was dying of lung cancer and crisscrossing the country in an RV, chasing a story on an elusive serial killer.

The job offered her the perfect way to stay out of sight and off the grid, traveling the back roads of America completely unnoticed.

As far as Juanita Banana was concerned, she’d disappeared from the face of the earth.

“But then I met Ambrose, moved in with him as his assistant, and got sloppy. I forgot I was a hunted woman and how resourceful Blackthorn is,” she said. “The other day, they found me and attempted an ‘extraordinary rendition,’ but I guess they didn’t do enough research on me. They didn’t know that I got a prison black belt.”

She smiled with pride. Wiping the parking lot with the Blackthorn ops was apparently a pleasant memory.

“What are you still doing here?” Monk asked. “Why haven’t you run?”

“Because I love your brother, you idiot,” Yuki said.

“It’s probably a good idea to have someone on tap as a backup in case it doesn’t work out,” Irwin said. “Someone who really understands what you are going through right now.”

“And that would be you,” Yuki said.

“I know what you’re feeling,” Irwin said. “I share your isolation, your fear, your pain under the yoke of injustice. Great relationships have been built on far less.”

“The yoke of injustice?” I said.

“You’d have to be in our shoes to understand,” Irwin said, reaching out to touch Yuki.

“If your hand touches me, I will break it,” she said.

He withdrew it. “You can see how emotionally scarred she is already.”

Monk groaned. “If you really cared about Ambrose, you’d go and take the danger that follows you as far away from him as you can get.”

“I would, but it’s not that simple,” she said. “I know that they are watching him and I’m afraid of what they might do to him if they get frustrated about not being able to find me. They might think that hurting him will bring me back.”

And they’d be right, because even the thought that they might harm him was keeping her close by. Maybe they knew that might happen, too. “How do you know they are watching him?”

“Twenty-twenty hindsight and a quick recon under cover of darkness,” she said. “A new family moved in across the street a week or so ago. And ever since, there have been a lot of cable, telephone, and electrical service trucks in the neighborhood. Obviously, it was Blackthorn setting up shop for round-the-clock surveillance.”

“Or you have a vivid imagination,” Monk said.

“I didn’t imagine getting grabbed at the grocery store,” Yuki said. “How do you think they knew I’d be there with enough notice to get there ahead of me?”

I’d had the same question when I watched the surveillance video. Now she’d answered it.

“So what’s the plan?” Irwin asked. “We all hide out here until my bad guys and her bad guys give up and go away?”

That was my initial plan, but it didn’t seem like a great long-term strategy.

“Because if it is,” Irwin continued, “I’m game. I can teach Yuki to crochet.”

“I would rather give myself up to Blackthorn and let them torture me to death,” Yuki said.

I thought about the similarities of their plight and then, out of nowhere, a plan came to me almost fully formed. It was risky, and there were a thousand ways it could go wrong, but there was one aspect to it that was too appealing to ignore, so I led with that.

“My plan is to kill two birds with one stone,” I said.

“That’s a terrible plan,” Monk said.

“You haven’t even heard it yet,” I said.

“It would be much better to kill two birds with two stones,” Monk said.

“I think you’re missing the point of the analogy,” Irwin said. “Killing two birds with one stone refers to accomplishing multiple goals with one action.”

“You could kill four birds with two stones,” Monk said. “That would be a good plan.”

“Forget about the birds,” I said. “I am sorry I even mentioned birds. For this plan to work, we’re going to need to borrow a mail delivery truck. Can you get us one, Irwin?”

“No problem,” Irwin said. “I have many brothers in the international fraternity of letter carriers.”

“Great, now all we need is a script, clockwork timing, this gun, and a lot of luck.”

“And two stones,” Monk said. “Or four.”

“Forget the stones. There are no stones involved.” I shifted my gaze between Yuki and Irwin. “If this works, neither one of you will have to be on the run any longer. But I won’t lie to you—this plan will put you both in serious danger.”

“I’m tired of hiding,” Irwin said.

“Me, too,” Yuki said.

“We’re in this together,” Irwin said. “To the bitter end.”

“Yours is going to come immediately if you don’t stop hitting on me,” she said to him, then looked back at me. “Tell me what you’ve got in mind.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Mr. Monk and the Plan

I
t had been only a day or so since Ambrose asked us to look for Yuki, but he told me later that it felt to him like it had been weeks. He paced around the house and kept peeking out the windows, hoping to see Yuki returning. But all he saw was the cable installers and phone repair trucks coming and going across the street.

The way he explained it to me, he’d always felt safe, warm, and comfortable in his home, but ever since Yuki left, he felt trapped. Before she came into his life, there really wasn’t anything outside his door that he wanted.

Out there were chaos, uncertainty, feces, crowds, unpredictability, wild animals, uncertain borders, billions of insects, automobile traffic, germs, birds—all of which added up to inconceivable dangers and constant risk across an incalculable vastness topped by an endless sky.

It was a space he couldn’t wrap his mind around. Just thinking about it made him break out in a sweat.

His house was the opposite of all that.

The walls and the roof created defined boundaries, safety, calm, certainty, isolation, normalcy, and predictability. He had almost total control over his environment. He could visualize it, know it, and master it.

But now she was out there somewhere and he was inside and that was unbearable.

Even if he could go outside, he wouldn’t know where to look for her, and that was if he could somehow shut out all the distractions, all the chaos, all the unknowns.

And the whole time he was out there, he’d be afraid that while he was gone, she’d come back and leave again because he wasn’t there like he was supposed to be.

It reminded him of how he’d felt those first few years, even that first long decade, after his father went out for Chinese food and didn’t come back. Ambrose’s biggest fear was that whatever he’d done that drove his father away had now scared Yuki off, too.

It took thirty years for his dad to finally come back. He prayed that she would return to him sooner than that.

Ambrose tried to distract himself from his fears and worries by working on his latest assignment—writing an owner’s manual for an electronic rice cooker that was so advanced it also connected to the home wireless network and could be programmed from afar with a smartphone application.

But his muse had abandoned him when Yuki left. His writing was flat, sterile, passionless. He couldn’t seem to find his voice, or to capture the character of the rice cooker and, with it, the life-changing potential that it offered to the consumer.

It suddenly struck him that his life without Yuki was like trying to cook rice without water: dry and unfulfilled.

No wonder he couldn’t write the manual.

There was a knock at the door. It was a sound that always made him nervous, since it meant he had to breach the security of his home to let someone, or something, from out there gain access to him and his safe little world.

But it could be Yuki.

Then again, she wouldn’t knock—she would just come in.

So who was it?

Ambrose crept up and peered through the peephole. He saw a cherubic mailman and a U.S. Postal Service truck parked at the curb. This was Irwin Deeb, but Ambrose didn’t know him, of course, at the time.

The mailman held a Priority Mail flat-rate envelope, which made Ambrose happy.

Ambrose liked Priority Mail flat-rate envelopes because he didn’t have to calculate postage no matter what he put in them. He also liked having them around. There was something remarkable and comforting about an item that managed to stay the same even as it changed. So he kept a minimum of one hundred Priority Mail flat-rate envelopes in a drawer of his desk at all times just because it made him feel good.

He opened the door. “Yes?”

“Are you Ambrose Monk?” Irwin asked.

“You must be new. Who else would be here?”

“I have a package for you,” the mailman said and handed it to him.

“How come it wasn’t delivered with my regular mail?”

“It came in after your postal carrier left,” the mailman said. “Have a good day.”

The mailman turned and hurried back to his truck. That’s when Ambrose noticed the Priority Mail envelope was just like all the others in his drawer—missing stamps and a postmark.

That made no sense at all.

Why was the mailman delivering a Priority Mail envelope that hadn’t been posted?

Ambrose was about to call out to the mailman when he noticed something else.

The address was in Yuki’s handwriting
.

When he looked up again, the mail truck was already driving way.

Stunned, Ambrose closed the door, locked it and bolted it, then took the envelope to the dining room, placed it on the table, and sat down in front of it.

This was all very odd.

He pulled open the tab and removed four crisp sheets of paper, all written in Yuki’s handwriting.

One appeared to be a letter and the other three looked like pages from a handwritten screenplay.

He read the letter:

Ambrose,

Do not read this letter out loud. Your house is under visual and audio surveillance by very bad people from my past who tried to abduct me at the grocery store. They are in the house and service vehicles across the street.

Do not spy on them, but do keep compulsively looking out the window for me. You have to act as if nothing has changed.

I am safe. Adrian and Natalie are with me and we have a plan that we hope will make everything right so that I can come home again.

I am going to call you in one hour. I have enclosed a script for our phone conversation. It is very important that you follow the script word for word, since they will be listening.

Please know that I love you, that I am nearby, and that I will never leave you.

Love,

Yuki

Ambrose read the letter twice and when he was done, he realized that he was crying tears of joy.

* * *

Yuki called Ambrose precisely one hour later from my car where we were parked on Golden Gate Avenue, just east of Hyde in San Francisco. She used a throwaway cell phone that we bought at a convenience store and we put the conversation on speaker so we could all hear it.

This is the script that they performed, and quite dramatically, too:

Ambrose:
Greetings, you’ve reached the home of Ambrose Monk. Ambrose Monk speaking.

Yuki:
It’s me.

Ambrose:
Where are you? What happened?

Yuki:
My past caught up with me. A long time ago I stole a lot of money from some very bad people and stashed it away. They want it back.

Ambrose:
So give it to them.

Yuki:
I can’t. It’s gone beyond that now. They also want me dead. I’m calling to say good-bye.

Ambrose:
Please don’t go. We can figure this out.

Yuki:
I already have. I’m going to use the money to start a new life in another country, long enough to get plastic surgery and create a bulletproof identity. When I’m done, nobody will know that I was ever Japanese.

Ambrose:
They’ll catch you if you try to go back to St. Louis for the money.

Yuki:
I don’t have to, it’s right here in San Francisco. The money was in a box I stowed with friends. They had no idea what was inside. A few weeks ago, I had them send it to me at a post office in the city. I told them I was a student now at Hastings.

Ambrose:
What if whoever is chasing you knows about the package?

Yuki:
I am sending a stranger in to get it for me, then meeting him in the alley in back.

Ambrose:
It sounds dangerous. I don’t like it.

Yuki:
I don’t, either. But I promise this isn’t the end. It’s a beginning.

Ambrose:
It feels like the end to me.

Yuki:
Someday a woman you don’t recognize is going to come up to you, give you a kiss, and whisper that she loves you. That woman will be me.

Yuki hangs up.

It was a powerful scene, and all of us but Monk had tears in our eyes when it was over. Irwin actually applauded.

The emotion Yuki and Ambrose brought to the scene was palpable, probably because the words and the sentiments behind them weren’t too far away from what both of them were actually feeling.

And I am not just saying that because I wrote the little play, with input from Yuki and Monk, of course.

The post office where Irwin got his mail was on Golden Gate Avenue and Hyde, across from the University of California’s Hastings College of Law.

We figured it would be too on-the-nose to mention the street that the post office was on in the conversation, so we dropped in a mention of Hastings instead for Blackthorn to work with.

I wanted to invest Blackthorn in the story. I was hoping that if they had to deduce where the post office was, they’d be so busy flattering themselves for their cleverness that they wouldn’t stop to think that maybe they were being manipulated. I also hoped they would be able to triangulate where the cell phone call originated, which would help them pinpoint the post office, which was right across the street from where we were parked.

Monk’s contributions included writing Ambrose’s greeting and constantly checking the word count. He was pleased because the final draft of the script was 290 words, 1,182 characters, and 1,460 characters if we included the spaces between words, all even numbers, a balance we achieved thanks to some judicious trimming.

“I think you have a future as a writer,” Monk said.

“What would I write about?” I said. “My life isn’t that interesting.”

“Mine is,” Monk said.

It was something to think about.

The post office was a one-story, virtually windowless concrete block on the northeast corner of Golden Gate Avenue and Hyde Street that looked like a remodeled mausoleum which, architecturally speaking, made it fit in perfectly with the Hastings College of Law
monoliths that were on two of the opposite corners.

Golden Gate Avenue was a one-way street with the traffic heading eastbound. Hyde was a one-way street with southbound traffic. We were parked facing the intersection and directly across the street from the mouth of the alley behind the post office.

The alley didn’t cut clear across the block to Turk Street to the north. Instead, it formed an L, opening on Larkin to the west instead, which meant that Monk and I couldn’t see what was going on at the other end of the alley. But I suspected a black panel van would soon be parking on the Larkin side and another would soon be showing up near us.

Irwin had changed into street clothes, sunglasses, and a baseball cap that I’d picked up for him on the cheap at the same Marshalls I went to the other day. Now that he was out of his uniform, I didn’t think anybody would recognize him as the mailman who went to Ambrose’s door.

Immediately after the call, Irwin and Yuki got out of the car and walked over to the Allstars Donuts and Burgers, on the northeast corner of Golden Gate and Hyde, to have a cup of coffee and give all the players in the game time to get into position.

Sure enough, a few minutes later a black panel van with tinted windows parked in a red zone just a few yards behind us.

I took out my cell phone and made calls to Yuki and two other people, and then took out the gun and put it in my lap in case my timing was off and things went very wrong.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Monk asked.

“Not at all,” I said.

“So you’re racked with anxiety, self-doubt, inadequacy, and facing the prospect of imminent doom.”

“That about sums it up.”

“Now you know how I’ve felt every day since I was born,” Monk said. “Actually, since shortly before my birth. I dreaded the birth canal.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“Because I’ve been suffering from PTSD ever since.”

That’s when Irwin Deeb emerged from the restaurant. We watched him in silence as he crossed the street and entered the post office to claim his vacation hold mail.

I took a deep breath.

The game was about to begin. I just prayed it wouldn’t end with anybody getting killed.