Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu Read Online Free Page A

good-natured woman when she wasn’t knocked up.
    She walked away and I saw Monk looking at her, too. From the expression on his face, he didn’t seem any fonder of her than I was. He went back to organizing the carousel and I continued searching for values.
    I ended up finding a Juicy jacket, a pair of Von Dutch pants, a couple of Paul Frank T-shirts, and a pair of running shoes that altogether cost less than any one of those items would individually at their original prices.
    I felt so good about my shopping prowess that I took Monk to the Nordstrom café for a snack, my treat. It wasn’t particularly magnanimous of me, since I knew that all he’d order was a bottle of Sierra Springs water.
    On the way to the café he nearly collided with an old man who came around a pillar wheeling an oxygen tank behind him. He was wheezing, the tiny tubes from the tank running up to his nose. Now that I saw him up close, he wasn’t as old as I thought he was, maybe in his sixties. His grizzled cheeks were sunken and his eyes were fierce.
    “Pardon us,” I said, and hurried along.
    But Monk didn’t move. He was examining the man as if he were another species.
    “Smoke three packs a day for thirty years and you can have one of these, too,” the man wheezed, and knocked his knuckles against the tank.
    Monk cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. I went back, tugged him by the sleeve, and led him into the café. We sat at the bar, where a flat-screen TV was tuned to the midday news. I ordered Monk his water and got myself a coffee and a strawberry tart.
    I noticed that the pregnant woman was in the café too, sitting at table, eating a piece of cake. It looked like she hadn’t bought the blouse after all. I was tempted to run back to the kids’ department and look for it.
    Monk was still staring at the old man with the oxygen tank, who was walking through the aisles in the men’s department outside the café.
    “Stop staring,” I said. “It isn’t polite.”
    “I’m not staring,” Monk said. “I’m observing.”
    “Could you at least try to be subtle about it?”
    Monk smiled. “That’s like asking a snake if he can slither.”
    He picked up a menu, held it in front of his face, and peered over the edge, observing the old man and then observing the pregnant woman and then observing a nun who was sipping a cup of coffee and idly toying with the cross around her neck. By trying to be subtle, he’d made himself even more obvious. People were staring at him now.
    I decided to ignore him and glanced at the TV. Mayor Smitrovich was holding a press conference from City Hall. I thought it might be news about the Blue Flu, so I asked the bartender to crank up the volume so I could hear what the Mayor was saying.
    “. . . which is why I’m announcing a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar reward for any information from the public leading to the arrest and conviction of the Golden Gate Strangler,” the mayor said. “Please call the number on your screen if you can help in any way.”
    I plucked the menu from Monk’s hands and gestured to the TV. “Listen to this.”
    “We can’t let one man terrorize the city,” Smitrovich was saying. “Especially now, when our police force has abandoned their responsibility to our citizens with their illegal walkout.”
    I jotted the phone number on a napkin. “This could be a big opportunity for you, Mr. Monk.”
    And for me, too. If he got the $250,000 reward, he could give me a fat raise and I wouldn’t have to wait for clearance sales to buy my daughter clothes.
    “I’m not eligible for the reward,” Monk said. “I’m already on the case. I’m a city employee.”
    “You were. Now you’re just a private citizen who is going to get a quarter of a million dollars for solving the murders.”
    But Monk wasn’t listening to me anymore. He was staring at the old man. “He’s still standing.”
    “Good for him,” I said. “He’s a fighter.”
    “He should be flat on his