Detail office. A bunch of ammunition is laid out on a table as Herc loads a shotgun, blustering that if "this motherfucker Wee-Bey twitches, there won't even be a trial." Keep it in your pants, Supercop. Daniels appears in the doorway and calls Carver away for "a word."

In his office, Daniels tells Carver to shut the door. Carver seems to get that this won't be a meeting where he gets a nice big cookie for his promotion to sergeant, but he keeps his face blank as he pulls the door closed behind him and sits in front of Daniels's desk, asking what's up. "Anything you want to tell me?" rumbles Daniels. Oh shit, it's a trap! My dad used to do that with me, too; always worked, and usually ended with me crying from the guilt of stealing quarters out of his change jar, or whatever the hell. Maybe Carver's less of a wimp than me, though. (And maybe not.) Carver gazes back, allowing himself one blink, but doesn't change his expression. Daniels reminds us that, for weeks, Burrell has known everything going on in the detail, practically before Daniels knows it himself: "Except last week, we run the bug up into Barksdale's club office, and Burrell -- for once, he's a step behind. You see it?" Carver looks down, possibly getting nauseated, but covers by raising his eyebrows curiously: "Maybe he--" "I see it," Daniels interrupts him. "I look around the office, and I see that one of my people is at the Academy for in-service." Oh, shit, it wasn't Santangelo at all! Sorry, buddy. I guess your purple polo wasn't guilty after all. Carver looks at his lap, and I think he might turn out to be as wussy as I was as he works his mouth, looking like he's holding back tears. Finally, he tells Daniels, "It wasn't my idea." Carver was totally under the radar until Burrell invited him to come to his office for coffee: "I mean, I never even been on the eighth floor of that fucking building. And there's the Deputy fucking Ops, telling me how concerned he is about the case, how he needs to be informed, and...I mean, he's the Deputy fucking Ops, man!" At this, he finally dares to look Daniels in the eye, and probably immediately wishes he hadn't, as Daniels looms over his desk like a fucking vulture. Daniels blinks, and then sits down, loudly sighing. After a moment, he sits back up and tells Carver, "A couple of weeks from now, you're gonna be in some district somewhere with eleven or twelve uniforms looking to you for everything. And some of them are going to be good police. Some of them are going to be young and stupid. A few are going to be pieces of shit." Yeah, that sounds like the demographic makeup of the detail, all right. "But all of them will take their cue from you. You show loyalty, they learn loyalty. You show them it's about the work, it'll be about the work. You show them some other kind of game, then that's the game they'll play." Carver looks down, clearly thinking he's not ready for this much responsibility. Daniels leans back to wrap it up: "I came on in the Eastern, and there was a piece-of-shit lieutenant hoping to be a captain; piece-of-shit sergeants hoping to be lieutenants. Pretty soon we had piece-of-shit patrolmen trying to figure the job for themselves. And some of what happens then is hard as hell to live down." Oh my God, tell us about the mysterious money! IT'S KILLING ME! But he doesn't; Daniels gets up and stands next to Carver, the better to look down on him from a godly height: "Comes a day you're going to have to decide whether it's about you or about the work." Man. My dad could learn a thing or two from this guy.