Read Mr. Monk in Trouble for Free Online Page A

totaled this one.”
    “It’s running just fine,” I said.
    “It’s unsafe to drive,” Monk said. “It’s pestilence on wheels.”
    “I’ll take it to a car wash,” I said. “It will be good as new.”
    “A car wash isn’t going to be enough,” Monk said.
    We might have kept arguing about that, but we made it through the butterflies, rounded a curve in the road, and there was Trouble laid out below us, capturing our attention.
    The small town was tucked into a bend of the Stanislaus River and set against a sparse forest and disfigured hills that still bore the ravages of the hydraulic mining that had dissolved them like sugar cubes. It was a striking image. It was as if we’d just driven through a time warp and arrived in the 1850s.
    The heart of Trouble was comprised of four intersecting streets that were laid out in a perfect tic-tac-toe pattern, which struck me as curiously well planned for what must have been a wild and unruly mining camp in its day.
    The asphalt on our road ran out into the packed gravel of Trouble’s main street, which was lined on either side with weather-beaten wooden storefronts and plank sidewalks.
    The two-story buildings and their painted signs were all faded the same shade of sun-bleached gray. Wild burros wandered lazily on the streets and people walked around them with casual familiarity.
    I drove slowly, the uneven and rutted gravel road gently rocking the car. It reminded me of my dad bouncing me on his knees when I was a child. Maybe that’s because he used to hum the theme to Bonanza when he did it, bouncing me to the beat. I would giggle until I could barely breathe. Just thinking about it brought a smile to my face.
    Monk, however, was grimacing, gripping the dashboard as if it were the security bar on a roller coaster.
    I glanced down the side streets as we passed them. I saw a railroad station, some stately Victorian homes, a church, and an imposing stone building that looked like a bank.
    It wouldn’t have surprised me one bit to see a stagecoach rushing into town, pulled by a team of horses.
    The only signs of modern life were the telephone poles, the power lines, the streetlights, and at the far end of town, a 1950s-era gas station, diner, and motel. The few dusty cars I saw looked as out of place amidst the nineteenth-century buildings as flying saucers.
    It was a miracle that the authentic, Wild West charm of the town had not been spoiled yet by fast-food franchises, neon signs, souvenir shops, or even asphalt roads. Either the town had a very strict planning commission or there was nobody who wanted to open a McDonald’s or was willing to pay for a road.
    I stopped to let a burro cross in front of us. The animal looked up at us, chewed on something, then ambled slowly to the plank sidewalk and continued on like a window-shopping pedestrian.
    We’d only been in Trouble for a few minutes but I was already utterly charmed by the place.
    Monk looked at me. “Turn the car around and floor it.”
    “Why?” I said.
    “Because we’re leaving,” he said.
    “But we just got here.”
    “And we should escape while we still can,” he said.
    “We haven’t even visited the crime scene yet.”
    “This entire town is a crime scene,” Monk said.
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Unpaved roads, rabid animals in the streets, dirt everywhere,” Monk said. “It’s a complete breakdown of civilization.”
    “It’s quaint,” I said.
    “It’s the end of the world,” he said. “The whole place should be quarantined. We need to alert the authorities.”
    “We can alert them after you’ve found Manny Feikema’s killer.”
    “I already know who his killer was,” Monk said.
    “You do?” I said.
    “I knew it the instant we drove into Trouble,” Monk said.
    “Whodunit?”
    “Trouble done it. It’s this town that killed him, just like it will kill us if we don’t get out of here.”
    “We aren’t leaving until you solve the murder,” I said. “So