Mr. Monk in Outer Space by Goldberg, Lee (best sci fi novels of all time .txt) 📕

face when the bullet hit him in the shoulder was something I will never forget. It was raw, naked terror. Mills was a man who knew with absolute certainty that he was about to die a horrible death. And when you see something like that, you can’t help but imagine yourself in the same situation and imagine all too clearly what it would feel like.

It gave me a shiver.

Things played out on the screen exactly the way Monk had described them to us at the crime scene. Mills tried to run, but Mr. Snork marched after him, continuing to fire, the coughing ruining his aim.

The second bullet hit Mills in the leg, knocking him off his feet. He tried to crawl away, but Mr. Snork walked up and put him down with a bullet in the back.

It was an execution.

I had to force myself to keep watching. It was one thing to show up at the scene of a murder; it was another to watch a human being die.

Mr. Snork coughed again and ran back into the convention center. That was where the DVD footage ended.

Monk rolled his shoulders, cocked his head from side to side, and turned to us. I knew the look. He was going to tell us whodunit.

“What do you think?” Monk asked.

I thought he knew who did it. But before I could answer, Ambrose spoke up.

“It’s horrible,” Ambrose said. “At least it was over instantly for Conrad Stipe. This was like torture.”

“Maybe if he wasn’t coughing so much his aim would have been better,” I said.

“The number of times the victim was shot isn’t the only difference,” Monk said. “In the first shooting, Mr. Snork was perfectly centered in all four security camera views. But this time, there were instances where the shooter was partially or completely obscured by other objects.”

“It didn’t seem to me like he was avoiding the cameras, ” I said.

“He wasn’t,” Monk said, “but he wasn’t paying close attention to how he was being photographed by them. This shooting wasn’t tightly organized and choreographed. He also blinked.”

“Blinked?” I said.

“He was startled by the sound of the gunshots,” Monk said. “The other shooter wasn’t.”

“The other shooter?” Ambrose said. “This isn’t the same man?”

“I don’t think so,” Monk said.

This was the point when Monk would ordinarily reveal who the killer was, but instead he stayed silent.

Ambrose chewed on his lower lip. “Could I see it again?”

“Of course,” Monk said and replayed the DVD.

I wondered why Monk was being so reticent about announcing his conclusion. Did I misread his body language?

I watched the footage again. That time I noticed the blinking, too. But in every other way, this Mr. Snork looked just like the other Mr. Snork to me: the same basic build, the same color eyes, the same uniform, and, of course, the same elephantine trunk and pointed elfin ears.

“You’re right, Adrian,” Ambrose said. “It’s not the same man.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

It’s a question clever people like the Monks get asked a lot by considerably less clever people like me.

“It’s the same uniform that the first shooter wore, but he’s wearing season-one ears,” Ambrose said. “The nasal appendage is also the design from the pilot, not the more refined, less hairy one used in later episodes. This man is a Beyond Earth purist who is paying remarkable attention to detail. Notice how he’s holding his gun. He’s grasping it like a Confederation energy dissembler weapon instead of a conventional handgun.”

“So I guess it wasn’t his coughing that threw off his aim after all,” I said.

“He’s not coughing,” Ambrose said.

“Then what is he doing?” I asked.

“He’s speaking Dratch.”

Once Ambrose mentioned it, I realized that what I’d thought was coughing was in fact the guttural hacking of Snork-speak that we’d encountered when we tried to talk to the leader of the Galactic Uprising.

“Congratulations, Ambrose,” Monk said. “You’ve just solved the murder of Kingston Mills.”

“I have? Before you could?” Ambrose asked incredulously.

He had good reason to be incredulous.

“You’ve revealed that the killer is Ernest Pinchuk,” Monk said. “I never would have spotted that he was speaking Dratch without you.”

I might not have, but Monk surely would have. In fact, I’m positive that he knew “whodunit” from the first moment he watched the security tape.

So this performance could mean only one thing: Monk was giving his brother a gift.

I don’t know if he was doing it out of guilt for ignoring Ambrose’s efforts to help before, or as a way of acknowledging the importance of Beyond Earth in his brother’s life, but his reasons didn’t matter.

It was the most selfless thing, perhaps the only selfless thing, I’d ever seen Monk do.

Ambrose beamed with pride. “Would you like to know what he’s saying?”

“You can read lips?” I asked.

“Of course,” Ambrose said.

“In Dratch?”

“And seven other languages,” Ambrose said. “If you include pig Latin.”

“Incredible,” Monk said.

And useless.

How often did Ambrose get a chance to speak in pig Latin to anyone, much less have to read their lips?

Monk was overdoing it now, but Ambrose was too flattered to notice.

We watched the DVD again and stopped every few moments so Ambrose could jot down what Pinchuk was saying. When we reached the end of the video, Ambrose gave us the full translation.

“He’s saying, ‘Feel the hot kiss of my bullets of righteous justice, you miserable, greedy scumbag. You are guilty of unspeakably heinous crimes against humanity, the Confederation, the Beyond Earth-verse, and all of fandom. And for that unforgivable transgression you must die.’ ”

That was an awfully overwrought speech, even in Dratch.

Monk turned off the TV and smiled. “That sounds like a confession to me.”

Monk called Captain Stottlemeyer on Ambrose’s speakerphone and told him that the shooter