Contains spoilers for this episode and earlier episodes.
McNulty fails to reconcile with Elena, drinks heavily, crashes his car and ends the night with a waitress at a diner. He tells Bunk he wants homicide work again. At the detail, phone records and truck rentals connect Sergei to missing containers; a judge approves a wiretap. Daniels gets Rawls to transfer McNulty onto the Sobotka detail. Herc and Carver invent the fake informant Fuzzy Dunlop to conceal their loss of an expensive surveillance bug.
The detail connects a warehouse to the apartment building used to house the trafficked women and chooses McNulty for an undercover visit as a customer. At the docks, Beadie and Freamon watch Horseface lose a container and follow it to the warehouse. Frank discovers his phone account is flagged and sees Beadie working with police. Ziggy brings a duck to the bar and feeds it beer and whiskey; later McNulty calls the madam to arrange his undercover visit.
Frank uses an unmonitored office phone to arrange a meeting with the Greek. They agree to move clean containers for now and pay the union. The police dismiss the shipment as a mistake but retain Vondas’s number. McNulty drinks at Beadie’s home but leaves after seeing photographs of her children, deciding not to pursue an encounter with her.