We open with an older man and a young man setting up road closed signs. Just a bit down the road is their station wagon. As a pick-up truck loaded with migrant workers comes along, the pair don your textbook burglar masks and walk around to where the truck stops because of the roadblock. The men come up, order all the men out of the truck, telling them to empty their pockets and toss things onto a large piece of cloth they put on the ground. Then the men are to lie down with orders from the bandits not to lift their heads.
The men start to leave but before they get to their car, one of the victims jumps up and dashes toward the car trying to see anything that might help him tell the police something that would catch them. The older bandit shoots him, then the pair make their escape.
The robbers dash to a small bus station where they put some of the holdup money in an envelope which they put in a locker, then mail the key to a confederate, sending it special delivery so he will get it in a couple of hours.
A bit later, when Dan and Officer Walters get to the scene, they speak with one of the victims, a young man named Collins, who tells them he got a look at their car, a white convertible with the beginning letters of the license plate. Dan and Walter dash off for the hospital, then hear on their radio that the man who was shot had died. They spin around and go back to the scene of the crime.
This episode is unusual in that Dan doesn't just get information and chase after someone. Here he does some detective work. With his partner, he figures out that from where the men were all lying on the ground, there's no way Collins could have seen the robbers' car at all. They pick up Collins and take him into the station for more questioning.
While Collins is with them, he gets his special delivery letter delivered. Dan tells him to open it now and when a key drops out, he takes the kid to the bus station and they find what the policemen figure to be about 1/3 of the holdup money. Collins knows his goose is cooked and after Dan makes him angry talking about how he'll be in prison, his partners will be laughing their heads off at how they got away with it. He tells them where they can find them.
Of course this leads to a typical Highway Patrol roadblock scene where the bad guys see the roadblock, turn around, then go off on a side road before stopping for another road block, then have a brief shootout with the cops. I don't have to tell you who wins.
I very much liked the figuring Dan did in realizing that the one person in that large group who gave information couldn't have been telling the truth. I am not certain but in today's world the courts would probably rule that ordering the suspect to open that mail in police presence and then to take the key and go with him to see what was in the locker, was illegal search and seizure. They might even rule that without that, Collins wouldn't have told them where to find the others, who would otherwise have gotten away, thus they couldn't hold the other two men either. OK, maybe I watched Law & Order too much.
One thing happened on this episode that always struck me as odd. I understand a cop outside his parked car, just wanting to report in would reach in to pull out his radio microphone and talk while standing outside the car. But Dan and others on this one, like so many other episodes, when they plan to jump in their car and chase someone, almost always make it a point to stand outside and make their radio call before getting into the vehicle. One time here, Dan is racing to get to the bad guys, but instead of having his partner make the call while he drives, or let Walters drive while he makes the call, he has to stand outside talking on the radio, before he gets in to go on the chase. I know Reed and Malloy never did that and it just doesn't seem right.
I actually have a theory about why this was almost always staged this way. They did so much outdoor shooting on this series, having the officers stand beside their cars for the radio scenes made it easier to show them talking. If they got inside first, it would have taken more work to set up a camera to show them on the radio.
An additional note: The earliest of the two reviews on IMDB for this one includes a comment about the "country boys" who committed the crime. The critic says "Their accents don't suggest that these two have criminal tendencies..." I am totally bumfuzzled by this comment. First of all, rural California boys as far as I know don't have any sort of regional accent-they sound like any other native Californian, which isn't notably different from people from many other states. Secondly, how would anyone's accent ever suggest criminal tendencies? Your accent merely reveals in what part of the country you were raised. A second possibility is that if all the kids you grew up with, maybe along with a few teachers all had strong accents from the same area, you could well grow up speaking as they do, provided nobody, such as parents, worked to keep you from doing that.
Overall, one of the best episodes, letting me score it a 9.
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