A sniper named Johnny Kursko is terrorizing a neighborhood in an urban section of the city. He is on top of a building that was once housed a movie theater that the sniper worked at. It is later found out that he is an escaped fugitive from New York and he is shooting up the neighborhood as a way to get back at the people in the neighborhood who he holds responsible for the theater's closing. Reed, Malloy and Detective Sgt. Gus Brown get into their SWAT gear and go after Kursko and try to get him without any further bloodshed.

In between some of their one off calls - a woman beating up on a car with a baseball bat, a suspected residential burglary in progress, and a theft at an auto mechanics shop - Malloy and Reed deal with a string of incidents which may implicate one of their own, Detective Hal Forest in Vice. Malloy and Reed attend to two separate incidents in which someone flashing a badge and having official police ID with Forest's name committed a crime. The first, "Forest" stole $350 from a boxing gym purportedly on a counterfeit money case. The second, "Forest" stole a gun from a pawn shop, threatening the owner not to report the incident or else. In both cases, the victim is able to provide a description which matches that of the real Forest. In addition, Malloy, who knows Forest well, is aware that he is facing some financial stress which may have made him get desperate. They are not to tell Forest of these incidents in the possibility that it is indeed Forest committing these crimes, while Internal investigates. But a third incident may provide the break in determining if it truly is Forest committing these crimes, and if not how the fake Forest was able to devise and carry out such a plan.