Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu Read Online Free

turn public opinion against the cops. But as much as I supported Stottlemeyer and Disher, I was worried that the sick-out did leave average citizens like myself more vulnerable than usual.
    Luckily, I got paid my pitiful salary whether Monk was on a case or not. I wasn’t simply his investigative assistant—I was also his driver, his secretary, his spokeswoman, his personal shopper, and his Sherpa through the urban jungle of San Francisco.
    The one thing I wasn’t was his maid. But I didn’t have to worry about his ever asking me to do his dishes, sweep his floor, or clean his windows because he enjoyed doing those tasks himself way too much. In fact, I often had to restrain him from cleaning my house, too.
    It’s not that I wouldn’t appreciate his taking over all my housework. I hate housework, can’t afford a maid, and never have enough time do all the things that need doing. The problem is that he’s overzealous where tidiness is concerned.
    Believe it or not, there’s such a thing as a house that’s too clean and too orderly.
    The one time I let him straighten up my place, it looked like a model home afterward, and not in a good way. There was none of the domestic disorder that naturally comes from living in a house and that makes a home, well, homey. He made it creepy. Not only that, it smelled like a hospital.
    I also like to have some privacy, which isn’t easy when you’re a single mother raising a twelve-year-old daughter. The last thing I wanted was Monk rummaging around in my closet.
    Since Monk had no investigation to occupy his time, and he’d cleaned his place as much as he could without opening his walls and buffing the studs, I took him shopping with me. Julie needed new school clothes, and there was a big clearance sale at the Nordstrom in the San Francisco Centre mall.
    Julie was unbelievably brand-conscious. I could buy a pair of jeans for ten dollars at Wal-Mart, slice them up with a knife, and run over them with my car, and they’d look just like the jeans she wanted that cost $150. But no, she had to have the name brand or face becoming a social outcast, forever exiled to the geek corner of the cafeteria. Or so she claimed.
    I wanted my daughter to know that who you are is more than the sum of the designer trademarks that you wear, but it was a losing battle. If her clothes and shoes didn’t scream Von Dutch or Juicy, Hard Tail or Paul Frank, True Religion or Nike, she refused to be seen in public.
    The only way I could afford the clothes and shoes that she absolutely had to have was to wait like a vulture for the big sales and then pounce the moment the stores opened, which is what I was doing with Monk.
    While I sorted through the clearance items, wrestling with other desperate, henpecked mothers over pants, blouses, running shoes, and T-shirts, Monk was occupied at one of the carousels of bargain blouses, which were arranged in groups according to size.
    The arrangement of blouses wasn’t good enough for him. He didn’t like the blouses all mixed up like that. He organized them by brand, color, and pattern, then by sizes within those groups. Any blouses without a match in brand, color, or design he set aside in a section (more like a purgatory) of their own.
    I was glancing at Monk when a hugely pregnant woman snatched a blouse from right in front of me, the last one in Julie’s size. The woman looked like she was about to deliver twins, or perhaps quadruplets, at any moment.
    “That’s mine,” I said.
    “That’s funny, lady, since it’s in my hand and not yours.”
    “I had it in front of me,” I said.
    “The whole table is in front of you,” she said. “Does that mean all of the blouses on it are yours too?”
    Her purse slid off her shoulder onto the floor. When she bent over to pick it up, I was half tempted to kick her in the butt, but I restrained myself. I knew what it was like to be pregnant. The hormones can turn you into a monster. Maybe she was a sweet,