Free Mr. Monk Goes to Germany by Lee Goldberg Page A

wouldn’t take much detecting skill to find the conference he was attending. We’d worry about where we’d be staying once we got there.

    Ordinarily, this lack of careful planning would have presented an intolerable level of uncertainty for Monk. But this was an unusual situation and he was willing to accept the unacceptable. I saw it as yet another encouraging sign of personal growth for Monk that was miraculously and ironically occurring in the midst of one of his worst psychological and emotional crises.

    I hoped Dr. Kroger would see it the same way.

    Under normal circumstances, just the prospect of packing for the trip would have been an insurmountable obstacle for Monk. He would have wanted to bring six months’ worth of food, water, eating utensils, dishes, and bed linens in addition to his clothes and toiletries. It would have taken a week of careful planning, another week of packing, and then he would have needed a freighter to transport everything to Germany.

    So the only way that Monk could even contemplate this trip, much less actually embark on it, was if he was drugged up to his eyeballs. He knew it and I knew it.

    As soon as I dropped him off at his place, he took Dioxynl, the wonderful experimental drug that relieved his obsessive-compulsive disorder and subdued his phobias. He was able to pack everything he needed into one suitcase and was ready to go when I picked him up an hour later.

    But this Monk was a different man than the man I’d dropped off. He was sitting on his suitcase eating potato chips out of a big bag. His shirt was open at the collar and untucked.

    I pulled up to the curb in front of him. He threw his suitcase into the back of the car and hopped into the passenger seat beside me.

    “Ready to fly, babe?” he said with a big smile. Obviously, the drugs had kicked in.

    “I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘babe,’ Mr. Monk.”

    “You can call me ‘babe’ if you want to,” he said.

    “I don’t,” I said.

    “How about ‘boychick’?”

    “How about ‘Mr. Monk’?”

    He shook his head. “Why so formal? I’m not your geometry teacher. It’s me, the Monkster.”

    “The Monkster?”

    “Aka the Funster,” he said.

    “Since when do you have an ‘aka’?”

    “You really have to loosen up. If you were any stiffer, you’d be a sculpture. Want a chip?”

    He offered me the bag. I stared at him in amazement.

    Monk actually wanted me to stick my dirty hand inside the bag he was eating from and take a chip.

    “Sour cream and onion,” he said. “They’re yummy. It’s like they are pre-dipped.”

    “No thanks,” I said.

    He shrugged, wiped his greasy hand on his pants, and set the bag between us.

    “It’s right here if you change your mind,” he said and started whistling.

    The only thing more horrifying than spending twelve hours imprisoned in an airplane with Monk was spending it with the Monkster.

    That was why I’d brought sleeping pills. I intended to spend as much of the flight unconscious as I possibly could, blissfully unaware of whatever Monk was doing.

    It was a sad commentary on the two of us that the only way we could travel together was if we were completely drugged, but it could have been worse.

    Monk could have been himself.

    Without the drugs, he would almost certainly flip out on the plane and, with the heightened airline security these days, he’d either be gunned down by an air marshal or imprisoned for endangering the passengers with his disorderly conduct.

    So relying on pharmaceuticals was clearly the best way to go for us, for the other passengers, and for humanity.

    We got through the security checkpoint at the airport and boarded the plane without incident. Our airline was Air Brahmaputra, the cheapest flight into Frankfurt that I could find.

    Monk is a cheapskate, whether he’s drugged or not.

    We were traveling on an old Air Canada plane. The only reason I knew that was because Air Brahmaputra hadn’t even