About this time, Velma Kai pulls up, catching Shaggy Butchie unawares. Did you know your mom's got a gun, Kai asks Butchie. He does -- Cissy apparently gets skittish about prowlers whenever Mitch is off following his bliss. No, Kai repeats, Cissy has a gun right now -- as in, the gun she retrieved from Kai's trailer after waving it around last night. Sure, there are no bullets in the gun -- Kai took those out, by the by: "But I don't know if it's all right that she wanted to go and get it." Butchie figures that Cissy isn't a danger to herself: "She just looked me in the eye like she's got centuries of ball-busting left in her." With that issue resolved, Kai asks Butchie if he's been driving Tina around, with just a little too much interest to come across as dispassionate on the subject. Butchie scoffs and says he walked over from the motel to make sure his carefully-bartered summit was going off according to plan. "Give me a ride back," Butchie says. "I'm exhausted." Kai smiles; she is very clearly relieved that Butchie won't be appearing in a private re-enactment of Moist Thighs, Pink Bottoms 3.

The clean-up efforts at the Snug Harbor continue apace, not that Daphne is contributing much, other than to sneer to Dickstein about how much fun she's having. The lawyer protests that he made a commitment to help out. "No, I'm just saying this is so much fun," Daphne repeats with no conviction whatsoever. "I'm so glad we reconciled." Good news, everyone -- it's another castrating female character in the Milch-o-verse -- that trope never gets old, not even for a second. Meanwhile, Palaka has returned from the emergency room, his right wrist encased in plaster. Dickstein introduces him to his fiancée while Palaka babbles on: "It's not something I'd want to do every day, medical treatment, but it's also something not to be afraid of." At this point, Dr. Smith rides up on his bicycle. "There's the assassin," Palaka says happily. "There's the murdering cutthroat who treated me. There's the prison torturer from the Abu Ghraib prison." Palaka is trying to sound all jovial while saying this, but it's worth noting that he's backing up rapidly away from Dr. Smith and his menacing ten-speed of doom. Freddy regards all this with measured contempt; Daphne makes an emasculating observation of some sort in Yiddish to Dickstein. In the meantime, Palaka asks Freddy to "do [his] cast the first honor, please." Freddy takes the pen and writes something rather lengthy that makes Palaka giggle -- I'm guessing it's a thinly veiled threat about further physical violence in case Palaka ever gets out of line. Either that, or "Get well soon, pal."