When they get back to the car, they find some punk kid leaning on the hood, enjoying some chips. When Prez tells him, "Move, shitbird," he gives Prez a big fat smirk and says he isn't doing "nothing." Prez says, "I got nothing for you," and clocks the kid in the face with the butt of his gun. The kid's like, "My eye!" We get a shot, and it's bleeding a lot. "Are you serious?" Prez taunts. Um, ARE YOU? His eye's about to fall out! He hauls the kid off the hood, yelling at him not to bleed on the car. The kid staggers off. Herc looks at Carver in disbelief; Carver disgustedly asks Prez what's wrong with him, to which Prez just laughs. Lord.

They're about to get in the car (finally) when suddenly a bottle hits the ground -- apparently from pretty far up, because it smashes into dust on impact. The cops look around, stupidly, guns drawn, instead of hauling ass out of there, and soon enough, another bottle falls...and then a TV falls. And not one of your slimline LCD ones, either -- a big-ass behemoth packed with tubes and shit. The cops are in total disarray as more debris rains down; Prez cowers against a wall, while Carver takes cover beside the car and Herc crouches behind it. Carver steals forward to reach into the car for the radio and calls for backup; by now, several bottles have hit the car itself. And then someone we can't see takes a shot at the cops. Oh, it does not look good for this sedan, folks. A bottle strikes Carver, who escalates the report: "I'm hit! Officer down, officer down!" This awakens the cowboy in Prez: he takes a few confident steps out of the shadows, apparently ready to fire with his super-light trigger pull. And then he does fire, into the total blackness of the tower. Good one! His shots are quickly returned; Herc and Carver take cover under the car, while Prez backs up into the wall again. And then an air-conditioning unit hits the pavement. Okay, you guys, look. If we ever DO end up in Baltimore, let's not go down to Franklin Terrace and try to show how tough we are.

Morning dawns on a tidy little low-rise complex called Ashburton Woods. Cut to a bedroom decorated according to the latest in Divorcé Chic: the walls are painted Institutional Bone, the frameless bed sits right on the floor, and various flotsam is scattered within pawing distance. Including the phone, which rings. McNulty rolls over to pick it up. Bunk, at the other end, tells McNulty to get the paper, which he reluctantly climbs out of bed to do. My mistake: the bed is actually in the living room (or he's in a studio); he opens the front door in time to surprise a couple of girls on their way to school with an eyeful of him in his boxers. "Hey, kids," he says, like that's not creepy to hear from a strange, mostly nude man. He climbs up a few stairs to steal a neighbour's paper, which he unfolds to see the disturbing story. McNulty grabs the phone again and mutters, "Oh, no" into it as we see the story in question: "Witness in City Drug Slay Case Murdered." "You happy now, bitch?" asks Bunk.