Free Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants by Lee Goldberg

share. I’m a firm believer that no road trip is complete without Cheese Doodles.
     
     
    The drive was going pretty well, everything considered, until we were within a few miles of Harris Ranch, seven hundred acres of feedlots teeming with a hundred thousand cows, all of them eating and crapping and waiting to die right alongside the northbound lanes of the interstate.
     
     
    You can smell the cows long before you see them. Monk began to squirm and gag the instant he caught his first whiff of those mountains of manure. It was as if all the oxygen had suddenly been sucked out of the car and he was suffocating.
     
     
    “What is that?” he croaked.
     
     
    “It’s a cattle ranch,” I said. “We’ll be past it in five or ten minutes.”
     
     
    “I’ll be dead by then,” Monk said. “We all will.”
     
     
    “Breathe through your mouth,” Sharona said.
     
     
    “What difference is that going to make?” Monk said with as much exasperation as he could manage while trying to speak without inhaling.
     
     
    “You won’t smell it,” Sharona said.
     
     
    “Get real, woman. You can’t smell radiation and it will fry you anyway,” Monk said. “Even if we survive today, our hair will start falling off in clumps tomorrow. Pull over. I have to get my gas mask out of my suitcase.”
     
     
    “Forget it,” I said. “In the time it would take us to pull over, rummage through your suitcase and get your gas mask, we could be ten miles away from here.”
     
     
    Monk took a handful of antiseptic wipes from Sharona and covered his nose and mouth with them. He closed his eyes, too, to protect himself from the sight of all those cows and all that manure. I wasn’t wild about the sight either, but as straight as the road was, I still couldn’t drive with my eyes closed.
     
     
    Once we were past the ranch and the smell, Monk drank about six bottles of Sierra Springs water to cleanse himself of the toxins, which soon created a new problem for him.
     
     
    “We have to turn around and go back to San Francisco immediately,” he said.
     
     
    “Why?” Sharona asked.
     
     
    Monk didn’t want to say. He rolled his shoulders. He shifted his weight. He squirmed.
     
     
    “I have to go to someplace private,” Monk whispered, ashamed, “to do something private.”
     
     
    “You have to go to the bathroom?” Sharona said.
     
     
    I glanced in the rearview mirror. Monk was blushing.
     
     
    “Great,” Monk said. “Now everyone in the car knows.”
     
     
    “I’m the driver,” I said. “I kind of have to know.”
     
     
    “Okay,” Monk said. “But that’s as far as it goes. It remains between us.”
     
     
    “We’ll stop at the next gas station,” I said. “There’s one coming up in five miles.”
     
     
    “You’ve got to be kidding,” Monk said.
     
     
    “What were you planning to do, Adrian?” Sharona said. “Hold it the whole time we’re in Los Angeles?”
     
     
    “That was one option,” Monk said.
     
     
    “Even if we did turn around, you couldn’t hold it all the way back to San Francisco,” Sharona said. “Face it, Adrian. You have no choice but to use a restroom. Or a tree.”
     
     
    “This is a living hell,” he said.
     
     
    I was beginning to agree with him.
     
     
    Before going in the gas station restroom, Monk donned a hazardous-materials suit, complete with its own fan and air-filtration system. I’m not kidding. It was the kind of suit that the people from the National Institutes of Health wear when they’re dealing with an Ebola outbreak. He usually wears it to clean dog crap off his front lawn.
     
     
    Monk secured the area outside the men’s room with crime-scene tape and then began scouring the lavatory with the industrial-strength cleaning supplies he’d brought along.
     
     
    Usually, in a situation like this, I feel incredibly embarrassed and alone. And unless we happen to be with Captain Stottlemeyer, I also end up having to deal