"A little bit more to the left," the Anaheim fire chief called down to his men operating the fire truck ladder. He was maneuvered slowly over to the fire escape, where Adrian was still clinging hard with his eyes shut. "It's OK, pal, we're here now," the fire chief told the detective, "We'll get you down."
"Carry me," Adrian asked him.
"What?"
"Would you carry me down?"
The fire chief rolled his eyes and yanked the detective off the fire escape. "Lower her down," he called to his men. Adrian seized hold of the ladder railing and held on tight until the ladder was in its fully lowered position. Loud cheers came from the throngs of people that had gathered to watch his impromptu rescue. Kight helped the detective down from the fire truck. "Thanks for coming, chief," he told him.
"Well, thirty-five years in the business, you've got to be prepared for everything," the fire chief said, staring at the detective in wonder as he started scrubbing dirt smudges off the side of the fire truck.
"Come on detective, your group's been worried," Kight led him back in through the front gate.
"Do you have a decontamination chamber?" Adrian asked him weakly, "That big blue thing, it attacked me, I need to be decontaminated.
"Decontamination chamber?" Kight was thoroughly puzzled, "Now why would we have something like that?"
"And you call yourself a family park?" Adrian half-screamed at him. Kight opened his mouth to say something, but apparently decided against it. "Anyway, Mr. Disney told me to tell you that he hasn't found any financial documents just yet," Kight informed him, stopping for a minute while the detective deposited several discarded napkins lying in the street in a receptacle, "He's going to keep looking though."
"That's, that's all you can ask for," Adrian remarked. They approached the Kopeckis on a bench near the firehouse. "You OK, detective?" Paul asked him, concerned.
"Oh sure, Paul, never better, in fact," Adrian nodded quickly, "That guy," he pointed at the wrecked Luigi still up against the wall near the fire escape, "He's relentless. And actually, he sort of looks like me a strange, automotive sort of way."
"Well Natalie's in the gift shop over there," Sandy pointed to it, "We're going to go our separate ways for a little while and meet up for dinner, if that's fine with you."
"That'll do fine, I hope you can have fun," Adrian told them. He weaved his way through the dishearteningly large crowds toward the gift shop in question, stopping briefly to produce a nail file and scratch at one of the horse head-shaped hitching posts along the sidewalk of Main Street. As he was about to enter the store, he noticed something stuck in the crack between the gift shop and the firehouse's walls. Something that looked like an old piece of paper. His heart pounding, he held up his claw and tried to snare it.
"Mr. Monk, now what are you doing?" Natalie stuck her head out the gift shop's door. Adrian held up his hand as he grabbed a hold of the paper. Ever so slowly he withdrew it from its crevice. When it was out, he grabbed it and hastily unwrapped it. His expression promptly sagged. "It's not Trudy's note, right?" Natalie could read his disappointment.
Adrian held up the paper to her face, revealing it was little more than an old map. "Well, there's still a whole day ahead, it might show up later," his assistant tried to cheer him up, "Come on in, Mr. Monk; you might find something you like in here."
"I highly doubt it," Adrian shook his head, but he followed her in anyway after dumping the map into another receptacle. He promptly strode over to a display of plush Pooh characters and began arranging them in straight lines by character. "Excuse me, excuse me, what are you doing?" demanded the clerk nearby, seeing the detective's handiwork.
"It looks better like this, Anthony, trust me," Adrian told him after a brief glance at the clerk's nametag. He quickly counted over his work. "Piglet, Tigger, Pooh, Rabbit, Eeyore, Owl. Yes, that's good and color coordinated. Anthony, did you happen to know Andy Faulk?"
In fact I knew him quite well," the clerk lowered his head, "He would come in here whenever he could and congratulate us all on good sales whenever it was a busy day. I'm going to miss him."
"Apparently a lot of people are," Adrian walked over to another shelf, where books on the park's history were arranged in a sideways pyramid of sorts, with three books in the back row, two in the middle, and a single one in the front. The detective rearranged them so they were in rows of two each. "Did you happen to see Roger Chalmers this morning."
"Of course I did," the clerk strode over and returned the books to their original format with great zeal, as if the world would end if he didn't, "He's always in here when I get in."
"How about just before Faulk died, did you happen to see where he was?" Adrian put the books back in the positioning he preferred.
"He was going in the bathroom over there," the clerk pointed out the window while putting the books back in their original format again, "I was setting those Disney Monopoly boards in the window up. Now I wasn't looking directly at him, but I could swear out of the corner of my eye that I saw him jump right back out and sneak into that service entrance right next to it."
"Service entrance?" Adrian's looked quite interested as he once again lined the books up in twos.
"This whole park is serviced by underground tunnels, Mr. Monk," Natalie had been listening in, "They have the costume department and ride controls down there."
"That's very interesting," Adrian remarked, light coming into his eyes, "Very, very interesting. If he had only five minutes and needed to get up to the castle quickly without being noticed, it would be easy to…what in God's name are you doing?"
The clerk was rearranging the books again. Adrian seized the one he was holding. The two of them engaged in a minor tug of war with it. "What am I doing?" the clerk sounded upset that he would pose a question like that, "What do you think YOU'RE doing, buddy?"
"How can you live with yourself setting them up like this?" Adrian pointed hysterically at the pyramid shaped the rest of the books were now in again, "This is so uneven it's almost criminal! You're going to offend people setting it up like that!"
"I have a system!" the clerk bellowed, "Everything has to fall under it! And you're ruining it by setting everything up like this!"
Natalie stared back and forth between the two of them incredulously. "Are you two long-lost brothers?" she had to ask.
"Detective Monk," came the sudden voice of Roger Chalmers from behind them. The executive was standing with his arms folded across his chest. "Can I have a minute alone with the man, Anthony?" he told the clerk.
"Certainly," the clerk scuttled off. Chalmers advanced slowly toward the detective. "Word has it you've been asking a lot of questions about me, detective," he told him.
"Well, maybe if I got an answer now, I won't need to ask anymore," Adrian responded, "How exactly did you make Andy Faulk fly like he did after you killed him?"
Chalmers chucked darkly. "Apparently, Detective, you don't realize who you're talking to here," he said, extending an accusing arm toward Adrian, "I happen to be the number two man in one of the largest media conglomerates in the world. I happen to have risen from mere technical engineer in Santa Barbara Consolidated to the boardroom of this company through sheer determination. I happen to be the man that Robert Iger trusts more than any other."
"He told me as much," Adrian didn't sound fazed, "Really, I've seen people like you before, Mr. Chalmers. They all believe that having wealth and power gives them to the right to get away with anything, including murder."
"I should tell you, Detective, that I am not a man you should try to cross," Chalmers warned him, "Otherwise it may cost you dearly."
"Is that supposed to be a threat?" Natalie demanded.
"All I'm saying, miss," Chalmers pointed his other finger at her, "Is that this happens to be an amusement park. Accidents can very easily happen here."
"You do realize of course," Adrian said with a slight shudder at the threat, "That any 'accident,' as you term it, Mr. Chalmers, wouldn't just hurt us. It would hurt dozens of innocent people who just came here to try and enjoy themselves. And no jury in this state would ever let someone who knowingly hurts dozens of innocent people ever see the light of day."
"The fact, Detective," Chalmers sounded dismissive, "Is that there's no way on this world you can prove I had anything to do with Faulk's death. Now if I were you, I'd just drop this whole thing completely. Unless of course you want to see exactly what a Disneyland accident looks like."
He turned and walked out the door before either of them could respond to this latest threat. "Is something wrong, Mom," a concerned Julie came walking up.
"Uh, no, nothing, nothing at all, honey," Natalie said quickly, but she still found it necessary to put a reassuring arm around her daughter, "Did you see anything you liked?"
"Everything's way too expensive in here," Julie looked disappointed, "You can't find anything for under thirty dollars."
"Well, maybe one of the other stores has something at more of a bargain," Natalie tried to reassure her. She turned back to Adrian. "I told Julie I'd take her on Splash Mountain while you were stranded, Mr. Monk. Since you'd get a seizure just looking at it, why don't you go meet up with Mr. Disney again? It's almost the time you agreed on."
"Alone?" Adrian looked very nervous, "You're leaving me alone amid millions of other people, many of whom may well have ebola or diphtheria or God knows what else? And what if the line to that…ride is too long? What if you're in there for hours?"
"Well, just try to have fun as best you can," his assistant told him.
"Fun?" Adrian's expression dropped further, "Natalie, you know I can't possibly have fun. It's not in my genetic makeup."
Natalie was already on the way out with Julie. "Don't say I didn't warn you!" the detective called after her. Sighing, he glanced around to make sure no one was watching before striding back over to the shelf to rearrange the books again. In a flash the clerk charged out of nowhere and grappled with him for the books. "Are you crazy?" the man roared, "Out!"
He jerked a finger toward the door. "You'd better be good at your job!" Adrian yelled at him as he walked out, "Because when I meet Mr. Disney again, I'm filing a complaint for wrongful business practices! Leaving books like this is just asking for someone to speak out!"