Plot

A police officer is shot during a routine stop of a car. Friday and Gannon find the driver and passenger, and learn they are paroled convicts. The police officer cannot remember anything about the shooting event to help convict the two men.—Bernie

In April 1966 Friday and Gannon, working out of Homicide, got a call that a uniformed policeman, Dave Roberts, was shot point-blank in broad daylight. Investigating the area of the shooting, police found a car used as a getaway vehicle but it was cleaned of fingerprints. At the same time Sgt. Al Vietti, working out of Robbery, got a call for a liquor store holdup whose two suspects may have been involved in the Roberts shooting since both crimes took place in close proximity. The two were Mutt & Jeff suspects, one tall and heavyset and the other short and wiry. Days later Dave Roberts had recovered enough to give a brief description to Friday and Gannon, but his memory of the incident was shattered beyond that a Mutt & Jeff pair of suspects was stopped while swallowing benzedrine pills and drinking cheap port wine.

Several weeks later Vietti and Friday got a call from a suburban police force that another liquor store was robbed, with description of the two suspects involved potentially matching the shooters of Dave Roberts. A police sketch artist, Hector Garcia, took down drawings of the two suspects, but copies of the drawings could not be positively identified by the recovering Roberts (whose memory of the shooting would forever be sketchy) or the liquor store owner robbed minutes before the shooting.

Now in January 1967 Friday and Gannon have been reading thousands of packages from Records & Identification at any free moment they can spare, trying to find a match for the two fugitive shooters, and with no luck. But then Friday gets a call from one of his skid row informants, Virgil Hicks, who arranges a meeting on the football field at Memorial Coliseum and reveals that two men, Roger Kensington and Harry Johnson, had bellied up to a liquor joint and were boasting about how "Big Mama put that cop down for good, both barrels." Hicks discreetly followed them to the cheap hotel at which they're staying on Crocker Street.

Friday and Gannon pull the R&I packages on the two thugs and get positive identification from the liquor store owners, leading to the arrest at gunpoint of the two shooters. Dave Roberts, however, cannot positively identify them as the men who shot him - but Friday and Gannon figure out a way to make the two confess anyway.