Ignore the glamorous neon lights in Las Vegas. Tonight, our business is not on the Strip, but off it, in one of the sprawling suburbs outlying the city, where SUVs thunder across the asphalt plains in search of the big-box stores oasis.
Or in search of the "Best Bargain" grocery store, which looks like the kind of grocery store where even determined bargain hunters who are not at all queasy about buying dented cans with a bit of sticky Mystery Liquid on the top might think twice before entering. A patrol car pulls up, and "Clay" the police officer asks the grizzled Officer Fromansky, "What do you need to get?" Fromansky reminds him that rank has its privileges, and young Clay the rookie will be picking up a few things for him. Clay protests that they're off duty, and Fromansky snaps, "You're off when I say you're off."
Clay heads inside the abandoned store. He grabs some milk, and heads towards the checkout counters. A cashier calls that she can help him, and he points out, "That's not what your light says." She flips it on, and there's some small talk about it being a slow night, which is, on this show, roughly the equivalent of waving around the red cape in anticipation of a charging bull. Nothing that happens before the credits is ever innocuous. Anyway, as the woman rings up the milk and prepares to ring up the peanut butter, El Rookie remembers he needs to fetch Fromansky his Ho-Hos. As he's heading back down the completely-inorganic foods aisle, a tell-tale click makes him raise his head, and he checks one of the local security mirrors to see a gun-toting, black-clad figure scooting down one aisle over. Poor, doomed Clay pulls his gun
And in the shot, Catherine and Gil are glowering their way into what is now a bustling crime scene. Warrick is hovering morosely on their tails. Did they pick the three CSIs most capable of looking angrily sad? Is that what's going on here? Anyway, as the Downer party heads into the grocery store, some yahoo is being restrained by the cops as he hollers about how he has to get back into the grocery story to check on his wife. We see a woman being wheeled out to an ambulance. She's looking pretty gray, but nobody's pulled a sheet over her head yet, so that's something.
Gil glowers, ever closer to the grocery store. If he keeps this up, he could pull something. Brass steps forward and says curtly that the body count's up to five. Gil glares some more. Over on the steps of an ambulance, Fromansky glares. Someone's face is going to freeze that way, and it won't be pretty.
Brass leads the way into the grocery store. At least they've gotten the sickly green pallor right: I've long preferred to do my grocery shopping at night -- not because I need to thrill to the possibility of getting gunned down over Ho-Hos, but because I totally detest crowds and will go to extra effort to avoid them (and no, e-commerce is not an option, because I am control-freaky about picking my own produce) -- and it always amazes me that these places, which sell food, manage to bathe their goods in the least appetizing light possible. Anyway, Brass hunkers to poor doomed Officer Clay's body and exposits, "Officer Clay entered the store unaware that there was a robbery in progress. Officer Fromansky came in after he heard a shot fired, engaged two suspects, lit the place up." Gil makes a boo-boo-kitty face; it's like he's never seen a dead body before or something. Catherine looks stricken. Warrick tries to look stricken, but lands somewhere around "Shit! Did I leave a load of darks in the washing machine at the Lucky Laundromat?"
“ Warrick snaps cab driver Rufus Sanders, gunned down in the dairy aisle. There's a joke here about lactose intolerance, but really, you can make it yourselves. ”
Maybe Warrick's all freaked out because Brass teleported over to another body. He tells us the two guys in ski masks are currently John Does, but the other two bodies have wallet IDs. The camera does a neat little zooming thing back to Gil, who is now taking pictures of the dead bodies. We also see Catherine taking photos: she's snapping dead Tangiers cocktail waitress Julia Reed, while Warrick snaps cab driver Rufus Sanders, gunned down in the dairy aisle. There's a joke here about lactose intolerance, but really, you can make it yourselves. Rufus, by the way, is lying in a pool of bloody quarters. Warrick wanders on back to the juice section and snaps a photo of a Hefty bag full of cash, mostly $5 and $20 bills. Eventually, Gil and Catherine gravitate on over there, and Warrick asks how Gil wants them to "handle this" -- I'm going to assume he means "a five-body crime scene" by "this" -- and Gil replies, "Same way you'd eat an elephant." By hiding from outraged animal-rights activists who are torqued over your chowing down on a threatened or endangered species? Oh, wait: "One bite at a time."
Gil then checks out a tablecloth-clad display table and notices the round drops of blood leading to it. As he heads on over, he calls, "Hey, Jim? Did you know that Charles Manson is only 5'2'"?" Brass deadpans, "Yeah, little guys tend to overcompensate." As Gil creeps up on the table, he says casually, "Do you remember the story about how and where the marshals found old Charlie when they raided Barker Ranch?" Brass has finally caught on, so he prods Gil to continue with, "Yeah. I always, uh, I always liked that story." Brass pulls his gun, and the music swells all Psycho-like, and then we see a bloody little kid in the fetal position. Gil and Brass forget to mention that Charles Manson was found in a cabinet, and just kind of look shaken. Then Gil screams, "We need a medic!"
The Who have no idea who a screaming Gil is. They're more used to his bellowing counterpart in Miami.
As the kid gets wheeled out, Gil and Brass are standing over by Fromansky's perch. Brass is all, "Tell me what happened," and Fromansky says dully, "I was in my radio car when I heard shots fired. I called for backup, and I went in." We go to flashback -- the lighting in the grocery store is much better here -- and see Fromansky looking somewhat alarmed at Clay all prone and bloody on the floor, then getting shot at. And then the flashback turns into a John Woo flick with the screaming and the bullets and the mayhem, and all we need is a dove flying around, but as there's no plausible excuse for introducing live birds into the store, we have to settle for popcorn exploding everywhere instead.
“ Gil tells her there are two bodies over by the beer. Sara heads on over. For those of you who care about these things: the straightening iron is back. It must be stopped. ”
Back in the present, Brass asks Fromansky how many shots he's fired; the officer thinks he's fired four. He continues, "I saw my partner on the floor. I went towards him. Then I saw the second gunman." And we flash back into another confusing gunplay sequence. Back in the present, Brass asks how many shots Fromansky got off at the second gunman, and Fromansky thinks it was maybe five. He was a little distracted by the slug buried in his vest. Gil stops looking as though he's been standing downwind from a pig farm and rearranges his features in an approximation of neutrality -- and by "approximation," I mean "only slightly hostile and supercilious" -- and comments, "Hard to count in those conditions. Are you sure?" Fromansky snaps, "No, I'm not sure. That's why I said 'maybe.'" At last! Someone calling Gil on his interrogation style! Gil looks slightly taken aback. Fromansky reiterates that he shot four times at the third man. I need a scorecard to figure out who shot how many bullets at whom. Fromansky elaborates on how he was going to check on his partner -- probably to tell him to stop bleeding on the Ho-Hos -- when he saw a third black-clad man with a ski mask and a gun, and began firing. Brass asks if the third gunman fired at Fromansky, and he replies, "I didn't give him the chance." Brass asks for, and gets, Fromansky's piece, and then Fromansky's all, "My partnerI want to be the one to tell his wife." What exactly is he going to tell her? "He died for my Ho-Hos"? Gil still looks like he's standing knee-deep in pig offal. Anyway, Fromansky and his bruised chest hobble on out of there (presumably to practice breaking the news with lines like, "I'll bet you $5 you're the Widow Clay" or "All those who aren't the Widow Clay, step back. Um, not so fast") and Brass checks Gil's expression, then sighs, "All right. If you're not going to say it, I will. Fromansky said he killed three, and there are two dead ski masks in there. Now, you cranked him up pretty good on that vigilante case last year. Is that going to be a problem?" "No," Gil lies through his teeth. Then he sulks off.
Catherine, meanwhile, is chatting with the crowd of employees and shoppers all huddled in the store's stockroom. After the usual blah-blee-blah about the ordeal they've all been through, Catherine informs them that she's going to talk to them one at a time. She skips an offer to talk to Julia Reed's husband right away.
And then, enough time passes so that it's apparently high noon. Warrick is hanging out over by Clay's body when Sara comes breezing in. As Warrick puts evidence markers down by Clay's gun (still in the dead man's hand) and a spent bullet shell, Gil shouts over the piano of poignancy, "What happened to your assault in Henderson?" Sara replies that she closed it, and she's up for working. Gil tells her there are two bodies over by the beer. Sara heads on over. For those of you who care about these things: the straightening iron is back. It must be stopped.