Cop Shop. Rawls throws open his office door, screaming, "McNulty!" Jay meekly reminds Rawls that McNulty's been detailed, but Rawls isn't rational, just mad. Jay offers to page him, but in the meantime, Rawls needs to mess up McNulty's cubicle a little bit. REAL mature. Then he orders McNulty's desk moved out of the unit. Petty much? "That's...Crutchfield's desk," says Jay. HA! He points out McNulty's actual desk, but Rawls doesn't have the heart to mess up another one. Cole rolls up, asking what that was about. Jay tells him about the newspaper article, and sits down, chortling. Cole asks what Jay thinks they'll do to McNulty, and Jay cracks, "If he gets caught with his dick up the ass of the deputy's wife, he's still gonna have more of a career than if they find out he's behind that story." Colourful! And, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of that happening; again: HBO.

As helicopters circle overhead, McNulty pulls up at the Terrace. It's quite the scene: cops are everywhere, and the car...she has seen better days. Before he says anything else, McNulty heads straight for Daniels to assure him that he wasn't behind the story in the paper. Daniels rolls his eyes and walks away before McNulty's even finished his sentence. Yeah, that car was burned. Great idea, Herc.

McNulty looks on as Daniels heads over to the open hatch of a Crime Lab SUV; Carver sits in the back, while Prez stands beside, looking sheepish. Carver tells Daniels that "they jumped us." "What are you doing here at 2 in the morning?" Daniels demands, with quiet fury. That guy was doing his laundry at 2 AM? Now it's doubly harsh that they messed it all up for him. We cut to a closer shot of the van, so we can see that Herc is sitting next to Carver, his head bandaged. He claims they were doing "field interviews." Daniels chuckles mirthlessly, before announcing, "I got a fourteen-year-old in critical but stable condition at University, and two witnesses who say that one of you princes cold-cocked him with the butt-end of a pistol." Herc denies it. Daniels goes on to say the kid's mother's filing a brutality charge: "Which for Herc will make it an even four in the last two years." A fair conclusion to jump to -- even after what we've seen in just two episodes. "None sustained," Herc protests feebly. "But all true," Daniels shoots back. He starts enumerating everything that they had a hand in losing: a car, two vests, two radios, a shotgun; he's also about to lose Herc for "a week or two of medical" leave. I don't know that that's such a huge loss, actually. Daniels demands to know what they learned when they went into the Terrace at 2 AM to "conduct field interviews." No one has any response. Daniels warns that IID is going to be on all three of them in a matter of hours, so they'd better get their story straight, or there's going to be "a file thick enough to see the light of a trial board." Prez shits a brick. And that's before Daniels straight-up asks who cold-cocked the kid. Prez shits an outdoor barbecue pit. Herc and Carver look down. "Me," Prez finally admits. "Why?" growls Daniels. "He pissed me off," Prez answers frankly. Daniels gets in his face: "No, Officer Pryzblewski, he did not piss you off. He made you fear for your safety and that of your fellow officers." Well, and I mean, he was holding a bag of chips. Those could have killed them with cholesterol. Prez nods. Daniels continues to spin a yarn in which the kid picked up a bottle and threatened Herc and Carver with it, when they'd already been injured by "flying projectiles." Then Prez ordered the kid to stop and, when he wouldn't, decided not to use deadly force, but instead struck him with a Kel-Light, not the butt of his gun. Prez nods some more. "Go practise," Daniels orders. "You fuck the bullshit up when you talk to Internal, I can't fix it, you're on your own."