Mr. Monk on the Road Read Online Free PDF

were for until I saw the Monks use them. They carefully extracted the syrup from the bowls with their droppers as if they were handling nitroglycerin, and then precisely squirted it out again in equal amounts into each individual waffle square.
    While we ate, Monk told Ambrose all about Molly, including such pertinent details as her favorite foods, the exact floor plan of her apartment, her vital stats (age, height, weight, width, eye color, number of fingers and toes, length of her hair, number of freckles on her face, overall symmetry of her features, social security number, blood type, location and number of teeth with fillings, length of fingernails), and the make, color, and license plate number of her car.
    “She sounds wonderful,” Ambrose said.
    “She is,” Monk said. “And I am still getting to know her. She could be even more wonderful than I already know.”
    “I am sure she is.” Ambrose opened the cupboard, took out a bright red box of cereal, and shook it. “Can I tempt you with a delicious bowl of Major Munch Peanut Crunch?”
    Monk looked horrified. “How can you eat that ?”
    “Breakfast is not complete without it,” Ambrose said. “I’ve had it every morning since I was four years old.”
    I understood Monk’s concern. I felt it, too, and not just because Major Munch Peanut Crunch was nothing but a bowl full of candy, sugary yellow squares with a mushy peanut butter center. The big selling point of the cereal was that it “never gets soggy in milk!” Neither would sugar-coated foam pellets, but you wouldn’t want to eat them.
    The front of the cereal box featured a cartoon illustration of square-jawed Major Munch, flying his spaceship through a universe filled with cosmic peanuts. Big letters inside a starburst promised that each box contained one of four plastic toys based on the cartoon dogs wearing trench coats in the movie Spy Dogs .
    “You keep up on the news, Ambrose,” I said. “Surely you’ve heard about the salmonella outbreak. It was traced back to tainted peanut paste, and your cereal was among the four hundred products on the recall list.”
    “Of course I know that,” Ambrose said.
    “And you’re still eating it?” Monk asked in disbelief. He doesn’t generally follow the news, unless it involves plagues, epidemics, and natural disasters. He loves those stories because they scare the crap out of him and confirm his general worldview that living is too dangerous to attempt.
    In this case, a single peanut processor in Texas that supplied peanut butter and paste for cookies, cereals, candy bars, and ice cream had a leaky roof in its warehouse. As a result, the paste ended up being contaminated by bird and rat feces, causing a salmonella outbreak that had sickened more than five hundred people nationwide and killed two dozen others, most of whom were elderly, were very young, or had weakened immune systems.
    The contaminated products had been found in school and hospital cafeterias, retirement homes, grocery stores, and prisons.
    As soon as Monk heard the news, he threw out his peanut butter, as well as everything else that was in the pantry. He treated the peanut butter as if it were radioactive without even bothering to check if it was actually on the list of tainted products.
    He’d probably never eat anything with peanuts in it again for the rest of his life.
    Ambrose shook the box of Major Munch Peanut Crunch. “This is not one of the tainted boxes.”
    “How can you be sure?” Monk asked.
    “This one was produced after the peanut paste was recalled. You can tell from the lot number.”
    “What if you’re wrong?” I said.
    “I’m not,” Ambrose said. “The cereal produced after the recall includes toys from Spy Dogs , a movie that just came out. The tainted boxes contained Peanut Cars, Peanut Rockets, and Peanut Boats from the Major Munch Peanutiverse.”
    He motioned to a row of plastic toys in a glass china cabinet at the far end of the kitchen. At the