Monk and What He Saw
by Cathy German
cathgerm@aol.com
Chapter Seven
In the blink of an eye, Lieutenant Disher was up the steps and on the platform trying to figure out the wheel that would bring up the metal plate. Sharona stood on the floor and put her hands to the vat's side and an eye to a loose board. It was too dark to see anything, but the smell of blood was strong, and she thought she heard a moan.
"Oh God, Randy, hurry up! I think he might be in there!"
"Give me a second!" Disher cried, frustrated. "I don't want to crank it down by mistake!"
Sharona could hear Monk behind her, chanting a low mantra: "Oh god oh god oh god oh god …" and over that she heard Randy grunt "Got it!" and she tore up the stairs to stand beside him. Slowly, slowly, as Disher struggled with the rusty mechanism, the metal disc rose, and she tried to peer underneath it.
She could see Monk out of the corner of her eye. He was standing on the sawdust-covered floor, hopping from one foot to the other: left, right, left, right, "oh god oh god oh …"
"Adrian! Shut up! You're not helping!"
Randy gave the wheel a strong twist and the disc finally rose enough for her to see, and when she did, something squeezed her heart.
There was Leland Stottlemeyer on his side with his back curled to the outside of the barrel. The suit he wore was light, so it was not hard to see even in the dim light of the barn that it was stained from waist to knee with blood.
"Oh, God," she said, trying to jump up and crawl over the barrel side. "It's him. Get me in there."
Randy stopped cranking and swung the disc away, giving him a clear view. He froze, horrified.
"Randy!" she snapped. "Get me in there. And call 911."
Disher, his lips pale, nodded, picked her up, and gently placed her on the opposite side of the barrel from his boss. He pulled out his cell phone. "Shit. Shit. It says 'No Service.' I'll try outside the barn."
Sharona had stopped listening. She was intent on Stottlemeyer, and she went to her knees and put shaking fingers to the pulse at his neck. It took her three tries to find it, and it was weak and thready.
"Oh God. Captain," she said, grimacing and pulling back his suit coat to look for a wound, "you're gonna be just fine. We're here now, and Monk is here, and you're gonna be just fine."
There it was: a hole in his suit pants just below his waist, and the blood was still welling from it. She needed to stop it.
"You're gonna be fine. Just fine," she said, making a snap decision and pulling her sweater up over her head. It would have to do. She wadded it up and pressed it to the wound with her left hand. "The ambulance will be here before you know it," she whispered, and with her right hand she smoothed his hair back from his clammy forehead.
"Don't move, or the lieutenant ends up like the captain."
"Oh god oh god …"
"And you shut up. I heard the cops talking about you."
Sharona held her breath and looked through a crack in the barrel. Disher was standing stiffly at the barn door, his hands above his head, and behind him was a man that Sharona had never seen before: bland and broad-faced, and he wore the uniform of a Tended Vine employee, and although she couldn't see it from her vantage point, she knew that he must have a gun. She saw Randy shoot a look at the barrel and then look away.
"Well this is certainly more than I bargained for," the man said, and he nodded towards the barrel. Sharona gasped and pulled away from the crack. "I see you found Captain Stottlemeyer. And the good news is that there are enough of these old wine presses to take care of both of you."
"Look," she heard Disher say, "the captain is still alive. Stop this now and you might have a chance. If you kill all of us, you'll never get out of jail alive."
She leaned forward towards the crack. She could see that the man was unmoved by Randy's plea for reason. He looked determined. Determined and crazy.
And speaking of crazy, her boss was silent, but she could see the top of his head as he bobbed from side to side in a peculiar and frantic dance. A plan formed in her mind. She apologized in her head to Stottlemeyer and leaned over and untied his shoe. She frowned in concentration as she tried to pull it off of him without banging it on the side of the press.
"Jesus! Stop hopping around, will you?" she heard the man say. "Some of those cops said you were nuts. I don't usually agree with the police, but in this case I think I might." Sharona heard him laugh, and she peered out the crack again.
She'd been a pitcher on the girl's softball team in high school. If Catholic girl's schools were good for nothing else, they were good for that. Sister Marie Irene had taught her all the finer points of a good beanball. She could hit the guy easily from where she was, but she was too short. If she stood up, only her head would be higher than the wooden side. She needed the freedom to swing her arm. She looked below her at Stottlemeyer, at his shoulder wedged against the side of the barrel. It would give her the height she needed, and she apologized to him in her head again. He would have to be her stepladder.
She just needed the right moment. Then she'd throw the shoe right at the guy's face. And they were big shoes, too. Heavy. Size twelve or better at least. Hopefully he would drop the gun, and drop it in a place where Disher could get to it.
And hopefully her boss would stay out of the way and not get hurt.
She'd just have to wait for the moment. The right moment ...
And then it came.
"Hey," the guy said, looking around the barn. "Where's that ditzy blond I saw you with at the Inn?"
Incensed for a thousand reasons, she felt her blood boil, and in one, swift movement, she rose, jumped up on Stottlemeyer's shoulder, called out: "Here I am, you son-of-a-bitch!" and threw the beanball of a lifetime. It zipped past Disher's head and whacked the guy right above the ear, and as she hoped, the gun flew from his hand, clattered to the cement floor, and slid.
In exactly the wrong direction.
It was headed for Adrian Monk.
Her heart sank, and she looked over to Disher. He was struggling with the man, who had - incredibly - stayed on his feet. The man had at least fifty pounds on the lieutenant, and he was trying to get past Disher to the gun. Now it was a race, a fight between the two of them, and she considered crawling out of the vat to join the fray.
But then, from the corner of her eye, she saw movement. It was Adrian, and he moved towards the gun as smooth as a cat, and he caught it in his fingers as it was still spinning on the floor and came up in a perfect, crouched stance.
"Drop it!" he called out in a strong voice. The gun was as steady as a rock, and her eyes followed the end of it over to Disher and the man. He had Disher in a headlock, a knife at his throat.
"I said drop it and assume the position on the floor!" Monk growled. "I am a crack shot. And if you don't follow my directions to the letter, I will take your goddamned eyelashes off, one by one."
Disher's mouth dropped open.
"Now!"
Something in Monk's voice and stance did the trick, and the man raised his arms and Disher took the knife from him and the man went to the floor, spread-eagle.
Sharona was beside herself with joy. It was the most beautiful thing she'd ever witnessed, and still standing on Stottlemeyer's shoulder, she threw her arms wide and cried:
"Monk! Oh my God!"
Whereupon Monk and Disher turned around to look at her; look at her, she suddenly realized, as she stood in her half-naked glory in the sexiest black bra that she owned, and both of them said back, appreciatively, as one:
"Sharona. Oh my God."
"Stop that. You don't need a wipe. Hospitals are sterile for Pete's sake."
Adrian was walking beside Sharona down the hospital hallway. The captain was finally out of Intensive Care, and it was their first visit.
"People come here sick," Monk reminded her as he gave a wide berth to a patient in a walker. "There are more germs here than there are in my own home."
"Adrian, there are more germs anywhere on the planet than there are in your home."
She sighed and dug for a wipe.
She'd hoped that the incredible display of grace and strength under fire at the barn would mean a breakthrough for him, but she'd been disappointed. It may have been some small step to a better place for him, but as they wove through the potential catastrophes in the corridor, she certainly couldn't see it.
But it was okay for the moment.
He'd saved them all and the captain was on the mend. She couldn't ask for more than that.
"Here it is," she said at Room 303, and she pushed through the door, Adrian behind her.
Her eyes fell on Randy Disher, seated at the end of the bed. He still didn't look himself. He seemed less ebullient, older than his years, still stressed from the near-loss of his mentor. He rose as they entered. She looked towards the bed.
"Captain!" she said in as cheery a voice as she could manage under the circumstances. "You look great!"
He didn't, of course. He looked like a man who had been concussed and tied up for fifteen hours and shot and left to bleed to death. She heard Monk take a choked breath behind her.
"Leland," he said in a shocked wheeze. "You look-"
"Could you please excuse us for just a minute?" Sharona said raising a finger and grabbing Monk by the arm. She steered him out the door. It swung closed behind them.
"You were going to say something awful, Adrian. I could hear it in your voice. Remember that conversation we had?"
Monk appeared shell-shocked. "He looks awful. He looks like death! How am I supposed to … to make nice about that?"
"Little white lies," she reminded him. "It won't kill you."
"He knows me better than that. He won't buy it."
"Trust me. It'll make him feel better." She turned for the door and then back to him and poked him in the chest with her finger. "It'll make me feel better."
Monk nodded and pulled at the bottom of his suit coat. "Right. Right."
They entered again. Disher was still standing, hands in his pants' pockets, looking amused. They approached the bed, and as they did, Sharona doubted Monk's ability to pull it off. The captain looked like a different person: uncharacteristically fragile, his eyes bruised, skin sallow.
"Leland," Monk said. "You look … uh ... you … look …" Monk described something in the air in front of him with his hands. "I mean, since we last saw you, it's amazing. It … uh …" He shrugged and put his hands on his hips and did one of the best Billy Crystal imitations Sharona had ever heard. "You look maahhvelous."
It broke the tension, and Sharona laughed and Disher and the captain chuckled as well.
"Adrian Monk," Stottlemeyer said in a sandpapery rasp, "you were always a lousy liar." Monk looked at Sharona, raised his eyebrows, and made a wide, shrugging gesture down at the bed.
"Did I tell you? Did I tell you?"
"Oh my God," Sharona said, pointing at the captain's left shoulder. It was in a sling. "Did I do that?"
Stottlemeyer looked down at it and back at her. "Dislocated. But well worth it."
"I'm so sorry," she said, patting his leg.
"Hey. It's a great trade-off," he said with a smile that reminded her more of the Stottlemeyer she knew, and she smiled back, relieved. "But you owe me a shoe."
"What?"
"They bagged it for
evidence," Disher said.
"That's fine. I won't need it for a while," the captain said, and he grimaced as he tried to reposition himself on the bed. Sharona pushed past Monk and helped.
"There," she said, smoothing his pillow when she was done. As a nurse, she knew they should leave. Stottlemeyer needed all the rest he could get. She saw the captain and Monk exchange a long and silent look, filled with things unspoken, and she read it easily. They needed to talk. Alone.
"Randy. Let me buy you a cup of coffee, she said going to the end of the bed and taking his arm. "There's a cafeteria on the first floor." She turned to Monk and Stottlemeyer and tapped at her wristwatch. "Ten minutes. Absolutely no more than that. Okay?"
"Okay," they answered, and she pulled Randy through the door, looking back at the two of them as the door swung closed.
She couldn't get the vision of a different Adrian Monk out of her head: strong, competent, unfazed by guns and knives, and she allowed herself to consider Monk and Stottlemeyer as they must have been years ago on patrol, how they must have appeared when they arrived on the scene of a crime: blond/red strength and energy with a love for the game; dark intensity with a mind like a steel trap and uncanny intuition … they must have made quite the pair, and she was sorry for the moment that she'd never been able to see them in that way. And as the door closed completely on the two of them, she admitted to herself that she was just a little jealous of a long history that they had and that she didn't share.
She looked at Randy standing next to her, hands in his pockets, washed-out, waiting to be led to wherever they were going. Poor Randy, chasing around after his boss, trying to protect him.
Just like me, she thought.
They had a lot in common, the two of them, and she smiled and steered him down the corridor with her hand on his back.
"Come on, Disher. Let's get some caffeine in you."
Stottlemeyer considered Monk as he gingerly half-sat on the empty bed next to him, his hands on his thighs.
"I owe you-" he began, and Monk stopped him, putting up both hands in front of him.
"No. No. You don't owe me anything."
"I should have listen-"
"No. No. You did what you had to do, Leland."
"So did you, Adrian," he said, shifting again in the bed and wondering why the pain medications didn't seem to be working. "You operated above and beyond the call of duty. Randy told me how you handled yourself, what you did in the barn, how you brought the guy down."
Monk seemed to allow himself a small smile of self-congratulation, but it was there and gone in a nanosecond. "It was nothing," he said, looking down at the floor.
"It was everything, Monk. You saved me, saved us all." Stottlemeyer dropped his head back to the pillow and sighed. He was exhausted, and all he was doing was talking. He could see some serious down-time in his future. But he had to say now what he'd been thinking ever since he'd heard the tale of Monk's heroics. He squinted at the sunlight streaming through the window beside the bed and then looked back at Monk.
"You'll be expecting me to call a reinstatement hearing."
Monk's head shot up, and his face was bright with hope, but within seconds the light in it dimmed, and he shook his head, his lips pressed tight.
"There's only one thing I want from you right now, Leland" Monk said, standing.
Stottlemeyer closed his eyes and hoped that he could pull off whatever it was that Adrian Monk wanted. And whatever it was that he wanted, Stottlemeyer would make sure that it happened, no matter what it took.
"I want you to get better."
Stottlemeyer opened his eyes.
"What? That's it?"
"It would also help if you didn't allow something like this to happen again, but we'll take it a step at a time." And Adrian gave him an easy smile; a big smile for him, and a genuine one. Stottlemeyer tried to calculate how many years it had been since he'd seen that. He swallowed.
"I'll try my best, Adrian."
"Good. Good," Monk said, nodding, and he moved closer to his bedside and reached out for an IV line and unkinked it.
"There," he said, smoothing the front of his suit coat. "I feel better."
Stottlemeyer sensed the warmth of the pain-killer flowing through him, and he gave Monk a hazy smile.
"Funny. So do I all of a sudden."
And warmed by the narcotics in his system and the vision of three Adrian Monks standing at his bedside smiling benevolently down at him, Captain Leland Stottlemeyer closed his eyes and allowed himself a well-needed sleep.
"How was your talk with the captain, Adrian?" Sharona asked as they pulled from the hospital parking lot.
"Fine, fine," Monk said staring out the passenger window.
Sharona wondered if reinstatement had come up. She hoped not. He wasn't ready, and she was pretty sure that he knew that.
"Monk. I have to tell you: you were … fabulous."
He looked at her, bemused. "The Billy Crystal thing? I've been doing that for years."
"No. I mean in the barn." She gripped the wheel and looked over at him. "I mean it, Adrian. It was the most fantastic thing I've ever seen."
He looked back out the window. "I have my moments."
She reached for his hand and he turned to look at her. She was pleased when he didn't immediately ask for a wipe. "Adrian, you need to know that I was very, very proud of you. And no matter what happens in the future, I'll always have that picture of you in my mind."
He nodded, looking back out at the view, not making eye contact. "It's hard sometimes …" he said, and he left it hanging.
"I know, I know," she said. "A step at a time, Adrian. A step at a time." She released his hand.
"Sharona?"
"Yes?"
"Wipe, please."
The End
Authors notes: Thanks to all for the enthusiastic feedback.