“Sometimes we need to be reminded where we’ve been,” Bessie said. “Anything that gooses the memory is good at our age.”
“The pot helps, too,” Mabel said.
“So does getting laid,” Gertie said. “Keeps all the neurons firing.”
Monk looked at his watch. “Oh my, we’re late. We really have to go.”
“Late for what?” Gertie asked.
“Flossing,” Monk said. “I don’t want that tartar building up. That’s how you lose your teeth.”
“Don’t I know it.” Mabel plucked out her dentures and showed them to us.
Monk reared back as if she had a tarantula in her hand instead of a set of teeth.
“Where are you going next?” I asked.
“Out the door,” Monk said, slipping past me.
“I meant them, Mr. Monk,” I said.
“Yosemite by way of the California Gold Country,” Gertie said. “Then on to Reno.”
“So you’re making a loop through California,” I said.
“It’s a big state—it’s hard to get it all in otherwise,” Mabel said. “What’s your next destination?”
Monk waved to me from the door. “Our motor home. Let’s go, Natalie. We don’t want to get gingivitis.”
“You can start flossing without me, Mr. Monk. I’ll catch up,” I said, and I turned back to the ladies as he hurried away. “We haven’t decided where we’re going yet. I suppose it’ll either be Las Vegas or the Grand Canyon.”
“You could do both,” Mabel said, picking up a brownie and wrapping it in a napkin.
“Mabel is our navigator,” Bessie said.
“Go to the Grand Canyon, and then you can double back to Kingman and head northwest through Las Vegas,” Mabel said. “You could even squeeze in Yosemite and Sacramento on your way back to San Francisco.”
“Sounds like a good plan,” I said. “Enjoy your trip.”
“You, too,” Mabel said, and handed me the brownie. “A treat for later. It will help you sleep.”
“Thanks,” I said and started to go out the door. I paused when I saw the boots and turned back to them. “May I ask you a stupid question?”
“Of course, honey,” Bessie said.
“Who wears the big boots?”
The women shared a smile.
“We picked them up on our travels,” Mabel said. “We use them for protection.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“We’re three vulnerable little old ladies on the road,” Gertie said. “But nobody is going to mess with us if they think it means messing with him.”
They laughed. So did I.
“A drunken, tattooed, neo-Nazi, devil-worshipping, ex-convict monster,” I said. They looked at me. “Sometimes my imagination runs wild.”
“Why leave all the fun to your imagination?” Gertie said with a wink.
I waved good night to them, unwrapped my brownie, and took a bite out of it as I strolled back to our trailer.
It turned out that Mabel was right about the brownie. I fell asleep while Monk and Ambrose were still in their first hour of flossing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Mr. Monk and the Duel
M
onk shook me awake at two a.m. wearing yellow dish gloves and shining a flashlight in my face.
“What’s the emergency?” I asked.
“You’re a drunk and a junkie.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You boozed it up yesterday, and what did it lead to?” He held open his hand to show me some crumbs on his yellow rubber palm. “
This
. I found these in your jacket pocket. There are more of them outside.”
“You went through my pockets?”
“Do you know what these are?”
“Crumbs,” I said and put my face back into my warm pillow. He shook me again.
“There’s marijuana in these crumbs,” Monk said.
“Is that why you are wearing gloves?” I mumbled into my pillow.
“I don’t want to get high,” he said.
“You can’t get high from holding crumbs from marijuana brownies.”
“So now you’re a drug expert?” Monk said. “I’m here to scare you straight, sister.”
I rolled over and looked at him. “Sister?”
“This is how it starts. First booze and weed, and then one morning you wake up and you’re one of those women in the songs we heard tonight.”
“I’m Lil’ Kim?”
Monk shook me again. “Wake up and smell the random drug test.”
“You want me to pee in a cup?”
“Hell, no,” he said.
“So what sort of random drug test did you have in mind?”
He looked at me for a long moment. “Count backward in twos from 2,888,222.”
“I had one bite, Mr. Monk, and threw the rest away,” I said.
“I’ll get you started. Two million, eight hundred eighty-eight thousand, two hundred twenty.”
“If you don’t believe me, you can dig through the trash. It’s still wrapped in the napkin.”
“You go get it,” he said.
“The only place I’m going is back to sleep.” I closed my eyes and rolled on my side.
“What if some chipmunk gets his paws on it during the night?”
“Good night, Mr. Monk.”
“He could eat it and become deranged.”
“Go to bed,” I said.
He leaned over me and aimed his flashlight into my face. “If we wake up tomorrow and find out that some child has been attacked by a pothead chipmunk, you will have to live with that guilt for the rest of your life.”
I snatched the flashlight from his hand, turned it off, and shoved it into my sleeping bag.
“Go. To. Bed.”
He stood there for a long moment.
“Are you going to give me back my flashlight?”
“No,” I said.
“But it’s dark,” he said.
“That’s because it’s night.”
“How am I supposed to get back to my bed?”
“Keep walking until you hit something,” I said. “That’s your bed.”
“What if I have to get up in the middle of the night?”
“You already have,” I said. “So now you’ll just have to suffer until morning.”
“Is that your best shot? Don’t make me laugh. I suffer all the time, day in and day out, year after miserable year, so bring it on, lady. No one suffers like I do. No one. I can do it in my sleep.”
“Good,” I said. “Then you have no problem.”
I’d trumped him and he knew it. He stood there staring at me for a long moment, trying to figure a way out of it. There wasn’t one, but I couldn’t sleep with him hovering over me.
“If you don’t move in four seconds,” I said, “I am taking off my top.”
Monk scampered back to the safety of his bed. I could feel him glowering at me in the darkness, but I could sleep through that.
“You’re mean when you’re stoned,” he said.
Bessie, Gertie, and Mabel departed in their motor home for the Gold Country before I got up and, as far as I know, nobody was mauled by any deranged animals during the night.
We had Wheat Chex cereal for breakfast. Without milk, of course. Ambrose seemed chipper, but Monk spent the entire meal silent and scowling at me.
“What’s wrong, Adrian?” Ambrose asked.
“Nothing,” Monk said.
“Then why do you have that look on your face?”
“I slept badly,” he said.
“I think it was that music,” Ambrose said. “It was very disturbing.”
“So were the harridans who were listening to it,” Monk said. “They are the Weird Sisters.”
I was impressed by Monk’s allusion to Shakespeare’s
Mac-beth
. And, apparently, so was Ambrose.
“Double, double, toil and trouble,” Ambrose said. “I’m glad I didn’t meet them.”
“Don’t listen to Mr. Monk,” I said. “I thought they were sweet and inspiring.”
“Of course you did,” Monk said.
I don’t know why Monk didn’t out me at that moment as a drunken junkie to his brother and I didn’t care. I had nothing to apologize for. But Monk did. He’d invaded my privacy by going through my pockets, and I wasn’t letting that slide.
After breakfast, I got up and took my first shower in the motor home. I was quick, but I knew Monk would still spend an hour decontaminating the area before he used it. I put on some skin cream for my sunburn, got dressed, and stepped out.
Monk was waiting for me. Ambrose was washing dishes, his back to us. Monk leaned in and whispered to me.
“I didn’t tell Ambrose about your disgraceful behavior last night because it would have crushed him. He idolizes you.”
“And you don’t?”
“I thought I knew you,” Monk said.
“Having a martini one night and a bite of a brownie the next doesn’t make me a bad person.”
“Two martinis and a hashish brownie,” Monk said.
“Nor does it make me a drunk or a drug addict,” I said. “I’m an adult on vacation and I am taking it easy. I haven’t done anything wrong or irresponsible, and I don’t appreciate you treating me like I have. And you have no business going through my personal belongings.”
“You’re right. I am being totally unreasonable. So how do you plan to relax tonight? Smoke some crack? Snort some coke? Maybe hold up a liquor store?”
“If this is how you are going to behave, then we’re turning around and going home. We’ll be back in San Francisco tonight. Is that what you want?”
Monk glanced over at his brother, who was happily washing dishes.
“He went outside yesterday,” Monk said. “Who knows what might happen today?”
“That’s up to you, Mr. Monk. Do we go on or do we go back?”
He sighed and looked back at me. “We go on.”
“Will you ease up on me?”
“Will you give me back my flashlight?” Monk said. “I can’t sleep in the dark without it.”
“Deal,” I said.
We took the I-40 east toward the Grand Canyon. I figured we could easily make it there in a day, so I decided we could afford a little detour onto Route 66 once we crossed the Arizona border at Needles.
Much of the original Route 66, celebrated as the Mother Road and America’s Main Street, was bypassed or paved over by the interstate, but there were still original patches, like the 120-mile stretch between Oatman and Seligman, decaying under the baking sun, weeds poking through the cracks in the dusty, faded asphalt.
We got off the interstate and picked up Route 66 in Oatman, an old gold rush town that was still much like it was in the 1800s, with wood-plank sidewalks, false-front buildings, and burros wandering wild up and down the street.
Oatman reminded me a lot of Trouble, a gold rush town in central California that Monk and I had spent some time in on a case not too long ago.
Ambrose was fascinated, leaning forward in his seat.
“It’s like we’ve driven through a time warp into the Old West,” Ambrose said. “Back to a time when there was no adequate sanitation.”
“Don’t over-romanticize it,” I said.
“Why do they leave this place standing?” Monk asked.
“So people can experience what it was like back then,” I said.
“Why would anyone want to experience pestilence and death?” Monk said.
“I prefer Solvang,” Ambrose said.
“This is more authentic,” I said.
“Authenticity is overrated,” Monk said, “and frequently disgusting.”
We drove through the center of town, then followed the road up into the hills, past the abandoned gold mine that had once supported Oatman.
I didn’t mention to the Monks that this stretch of road was known as Bloody 66, even back in the 1940s and early 1950s before the mountain route was bypassed entirely by the interstate. I tore the page about it out of the guidebook, too, just to be safe.
This particular section of Route 66 got its bloody appellation from its narrow, corkscrew path up into the dark mountains and down again. Some cars would die struggling up the grade, others on the way down when the brakes failed on the hairpin curves and they went over the edge. In the latter case, it wasn’t just the cars that died, but also the people in them.
I wasn’t concerned. I figured modern engines were stronger than those old ones, and I intended to be very slow and careful going around the curves. It would be the vehicular equivalent of a pleasant stroll through a winding path.
I was wrong.
The crumbling road into the Black Mountains twisted along a jagged hillside that took us around one blind corner after another as we crept up. There were no guardrails and I could see the rusted, charred wreckage of cars in the ravine below, lying in the dry weeds like the bleached bones of dead animals.
“Are those cars down there?” Ambrose asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m paying attention to the road.”
I sat erect, my body stiff with concentration, my back damp with sweat. As scary as the drive uphill was, I was sure the one down would be even worse, with blind switchbacks along the edges of sheer cliffs. I cursed myself for not catching Route 66 on the flats outside Kingman instead of taking it through the mountains.
“Why are we going this way?” Monk asked, as if he was reading my mind.
“It’s a piece of history,” I said, trying to justify it to myself as well as to him. “It’s the last remaining stretch of the original Route 66.”
“Did it ever occur to you that there’s a reason that they bypassed it with the interstate?”
“Yes,” I said. “But there are some interesting places worth seeing before they are gone forever.”
“This isn’t one of them,” Monk said.
The deep, bellowing wail of a horn startled me. I reflexively yanked the wheel, and the motor home nearly scraped the serrated, rocky face of the mountainside.
“What the hell was that?” I said.
I looked into my side-view mirror and saw a huge brown tanker truck behind us, belching smoke. I hadn’t noticed the truck before, but then again, all of my concentration had been focused on what was ahead, not behind. The massive grill was caked with mud and the tinted windshield was spattered with dead bugs that left so much goop that I wondered if he’d actually hit a few birds.