Braxton lies on his hospital bed in pain. "Oh, Ed, it's your conscience," Wallace sing-songs softly. "Hey Ed, you Rodney-Kinged those boys, didn't you?" Braxton, rather than telling Wallace to screw a flagpole, decides to confess. "They were perps waiting to happen," he growls through bandages and bruises. The show spontaneously changes its name to Murder, He Wrote. Wallace points out that preemptive ass-kickings aren't exactly a by-the-book approach to being an off-duty cop. Since the writers don't lay it out, I will: Before we saw Manny and Nelson, Braxton had apparently pounded the crap out of Manny. The blood sample was Manny's. Wallace snatches the nurse-call button and presses Braxton for more, pointing out just how much blood leaked onto the pavement from Manny's eye. "It's the way they stood," the cop coughs. "You have to watch their body language, and they started to give me lip...Por que this, nada that. Sound like a bunch of roosters. Little bandy-legged bastards." Braxton utters more racist things about the Spanish language. Wallace promises to give back the call-button if Braxton will just clear up what happened. "I beat the one kid," Braxton admits. "Every head I crack is one less crime against someone that matters." Now that her patient has completely and thoroughly incriminated himself in front of a journalist, the nurse decides it's a good time to escort Wallace out of the room.

Wallace confers with Walter, the D.A., who admits that the cops are going easy on Roth because they have worse dirt on Braxton and they're trying to protect one of their own. "You didn't hear it from me," says Walter. "And if Springsteen ends up writing a song about this, your buddies at the fifteenth precinct are gonna kick your ass." Bruce, start writing, please.