Read Mr. Monk in Trouble for Free Online

weeks ago.”
    “It’s not the same thing,” Monk said. “Tumbleweeds are like dandelions on steroids.”
    “I’m willing to take that chance if it means catching a cop killer,” I said. “Don’t you think that’s worth the risk?”
    Monk sighed and looked at the captain. “All right, I’ll do it.”

    The little I know about the California Gold Rush I learned back in grade school, so you’ll have to forgive me if I’m a bit sketchy on the details.
    The gist of it is this: In 1849, workers at Sutter’s sawmill on the south fork of the American River stumbled on some flakes of gold. The accidental discovery sparked a stampede of hundreds of thousands of people into Central California from every corner of the world to seek their fortune. They became known as the forty-niners.
    Whenever someone found a flake of gold in his pan, people would swarm to the same spot like ants. Overnight a mining camp would go up. And so it went, all along the rivers of California’s Central Valley and the western slopes of the Sierra Nevadas until there were camps everywhere. If the pickings were good and steady, the camps became boomtowns.
    Most of the wealth, though, eventually found its way to San Francisco, where the major mine owners, railroad barons, and titans of industry lived in their Nob Hill mansions.
    Ten years later, when the gold became harder to find and more expensive to dig up, most of the mining camps and towns dried up and were abandoned.
    The majority of the towns that survived have become sprawling bedroom communities of housing tracts and shopping centers that retain only a few traces of their frontier pasts.
    But there are still a handful of old mining camps, a hundred miles southeast of Sacramento along Highway 49, that have hardly changed over the last one hundred and fifty years.
    Driving with Monk on the highway, right down the center of the California gold country, was like passing through one Western movie set after another.
    Some of the towns were nothing more than tourist traps, selling T-shirts and Western memorabilia from within the aging, wooden storefronts. Others were meticulously restored and upscaled into pricey antique shops, French cafés, and elegantly quaint B and Bs so the towns looked more like Western-themed shopping malls than the authentic nineteenth-century mining camps that they once were.
    We took a turn off the highway and drove for miles up a badly maintained, two-lane road that snaked past farms and abandoned mines, covering the car in a thick layer of dust.
    All of a sudden we started getting pelted with what sounded like hail but covered the windshield with what looked like raw eggs without the shells. Yellow goop dripped down the glass.
    Monk shrieked. “What is going on?”
    “I don’t know,” I said.
    “Is it the end of the world?”
    “I doubt it.”
    I pulled the car over to the side of the road and came to a stop. And that’s when I saw what was hitting us.
    Butterflies. Tens of thousands of them fluttering across the highway. And they were still hitting the car, only not as many as when I was driving.
    “It’s only butterflies,” I said.
    “Is there any way around them?”
    “I don’t think so,” I said. “This is the only way in and out of Trouble.”
    “Then we’ll have to turn around and go home until they are gone.”
    “We can’t do that, Mr. Monk,” I said. “You’ll just have grit your teeth and get through it.”
    I looked over my shoulder and drove back onto the highway. Almost immediately butterflies started splatting against the glass.
    I tried spraying the windshield with washer fluid and running the wipers, but it only smeared the insect goo and dirt together into a disgusting muck.
    “I hope you’ve got some money saved up,” Monk said.
    “Not on what you pay me,” I said.
    “Then I don’t know what you’re going to do.”
    “About what?”
    “Buying a new car,” he said.
    “What do I need a new car for?”
    “You’ve