侦探小说：Mr. Monk Is Cleaned Out 节选 (2)

I hurried after him. "Where are you going?"

"To find the manager and demand an explanation."

"Why don't we just try another supermarket?"

"This is my store," he said. "It's taken me years to get it properly
organized."

"It has?"

"I come in late at night and arrange everything by product and
expiration date. It's a job that's never done, but I enjoy it."

Of course he did. That wasn't a surprise. The revelation is that I
knew nothing about this nocturnal pastime. I'd worked for Monk for
years and yet there were still things I didn't know about him. It
seemed that he had a secret life, one even duller and sadder than
the one he lived in the open.

"They really let you do that?" I asked.

"I also scrub the scuff marks off the linoleum," Monk said.
"Shopping carts are brutal on flooring when operated recklessly.
People should be much more careful."

Now it made sense why the store employees let him rearrange the
merchandise. It was a small price to pay for free cleaning services.
They could spend their nights on permanent break.

We found the manager, a portly fellow in a red apron, stacking a
display of cereal boxes at the end of one of the aisles. His name
tag read "Arthur Upton."

"Arthur," Monk said. "We need to talk. What have you done with the Summit Creek bottled water?"

Arthur winced. "I thought you knew. We don't carry it anymore."

"You have to," Monk said.

"Nobody carries it anymore."

Monk shook his head and waved his hands in front of him, as if to
dismiss the whole thing. "No, no, no, that's not allowed. You have
to sell it."

"Summit Creek has gone out of business," Arthur said.

Monk kept shaking his head and waving his hands in frantic denial.
"That's impossible. Unthinkable."

"Summit Creek borrowed millions of dollars to acquire an energy
drink company a couple of years ago," he said. "The energy drink
line bombed, driving Summit Creek even deeper into debt. They put
the company up for sale, but nobody was interested in buying it. So
they had to shut down."

"The government didn't step in to save them?" Monk asked.

"It's bottled water," Arthur said.

"It's the essence of life," Monk said.

"There's other bottled water. You could just turn on the tap
and drink from there."

That remark was so offensive to Monk that it actually stopped his
head shaking and hand waving. He looked Arthur in the eye.

"I would rather drink my own sweat but that won't be possible," Monk
said, "because I will be dying of dehydration."

"Have juice," Arthur said. "Or milk."

"Milk? Do you know where milk comes from?"

"Cows," Arthur said.

"And you're honestly suggesting I should drink 'that?'"

"Why not?"

_________________________________________________________________

***** ABOUT THE AUTHOR(ZT) *****

Lee Goldberg has written episodes for the USA Network television
series "Monk," as well as many other programs. He is a two-time
Edgar(Registered Trademark) Award nominee and the author of the
acclaimed "Diagnosis Murder" novels, based on the TV series for
which he was a writer and executive producer. His previous "Monk"
novels are available in paperback, including "Mr. Monk and the Two
Assistants," which won the Scribe Award for Best Novel from the
International Association of Media Tie-In Writers.