Take Two – Family Ties

By: Gladys Luna

It´s already night time in town when a man (Micah Parker) calls Detective Christine Rollins (Aliyah O’Brien) to inform her that he is in trouble and wants to meet her at a certain place. The woman is visibly left with concern at the caller’s request, but does as asked.

The next day, Eddie (Eddie Cibrian) arrives at the office and hears Sam (Rachel Bilson) apologizing vehemently to someone. When he asks about it, she confirms that she was talking to her sister since is part of her AA program. She tells Eddie about the reason why her sister has been so mad at her and even though she knows the damage she has caused she´s willing to work hard to make it up to her somehow. Right that moment Det. Rollins enters the office and tells them that she needs to hire them and help her find her brother Tyler (the man who had caller the night prior). She explains that he never showed up at the place he asked her to go and informs them a bit about his past – how he has been arrested for burglary and drug possession. The only thing that Christine knows is that he has been renting a room with a woman named Amy Riggins (Bethany Brown) and she provides them the woman’s address, so they can start looking for him.

Later that day, the duo shows up at the apartment and in an attempt to get some information from Amy. Sam pretends to be Tyler’s pregnant girlfriend looking for him, so he can give her some insulin he promised. She introduces Eddie as her brother and manages to convince Amy with their story. The girl lets them in after telling them that Tyler had shown up the night prior but only to take some stuff and leave as soon as he could. The pair check on the room and find a TAP card for the metro along with some tools used for carjacking. They also find a phone that has an encrypted text message from someone called “D,” so they take the phone to Berto (Xavier de Guzman) for him to help them figure it out. They update Christine about what they have found, and she confirms that she knows that the “D” stands for Damien Hill (Riko Ra), her brother’s old partner in crime. Berto informs them where the TAP card they found was bought and Christine believes that it is very likely that her brother met with Damien.

After a while, Christine arrives at the auto-body shop that Damien owns and finds his and two other guys’ dead bodies. Later on, the cops arrive and while they collect the evidence, she calls Eddie and tells him about what she found. Right that moment, she sees her brother’s watch and takes it with her. Berto succeeds on figuring out the message content and provides them an address in Bel Air so Sam and Eddie head towards it.

The duo shows up at the address they were provided and meet the owner Perry Hansen (Mark Humphrey), who doesn’t seem surprised to see them there. He believes they are part of the LAPD as he had called them to report a missing car. Perry explains that he is an exotic car broker and one of the cars he was supposed to sell was stolen. Eddie and Sam take a look at the surveillance video and find out that Tyler was the one who took it. They inform Christine about it and she also lets them know that they have found a photo in Damien´s phone that shows a compartment built into the interior door of a car that seems to have some white residue that Sam identifies as cocaine. Suddenly, Christine receives a notification from the credit card she gave her brother saying that it was recently used. Eddie and Sam head to the address where the convenience store is located at since Eddie recalls that there´s an abandoned motel nearby where Tyler may have been hiding.

Sam and Eddie enter the place and they see a light turn on in one of the abandoned rooms. When Eddie attempts to enter, someone shoots at them from the inside and then the door opens revealing it is Tyler. Eddie takes him to his office so that he can meet with Christine. He explains that he was hired to steal the car and take it to Damien’s, so he did as was requested. As soon as he dropped the car, Damien called him saying that, apparently, he had sold them a trap car and asked him to go back and pick it up. However, when he did, there were three men there torturing Damien and asking him about the drugs. Christine gets mad at Tyler and they end up in a fight. The woman walks outside to take a breath and Sam asks Eddie to go and talk to Tyler while she talks to Christine. Eddie asks Tyler to look at some mug books to see if he recognizes the killer. In the meantime, Christine lets Sam know a bit about her life and how she´s spent it protecting Tyler. Sam tells her about her relationship with her sister and how she´s been trying to be better so she believes that maybe Tyler can do that, too.

Eddie tells Christine that Tyler has identified the shooter as Nico Morales (Mathias Retamal), so they do a research and find out that the man works at a company where Perry, the car broker takes the vehicles to be detailed before delivering them to his clients. So, after a while, they come up with the conclusion that the drugs that where inside the car were stolen before the car was delivered to Perry´s house. The team identifies the people that have been involved in the whole process once the car was shipped from Italy. Christine believes that she must inform the LAPD since it was a case about drug smuggling, but Eddie stops her from doing that since it would mean that Tyler would get stuck in between. She gets a text and tells them she has to go. When she arrives at her office, she is met with Detective Jay Elder (Colin Lawrence) who confirms that he knows her brother was involved in the triple murder. The woman asks him to give her some time to figure out what happened as she knows for sure that her brother didn’t have to do anything with the massacre. Jay gives her 24 hours to figure out what happens, otherwise he’ll let the lieutenant know everything about it. Tyler has been taken to Eddie´s apartment and shares some time with Berto who lets him know about his past. As they are chatting, Tyler confesses that Damien had given him Perry´s house code to enter and steal the car, which seems to be suspicious for Berto who calls Eddie and tells him about the new-found information and also reports that Damien had received a call from a blocked number. He realized that Perry had called Damien at that same time so they figure out that Perry was the one who stole the drugs since according to his background he has been having some gambling problems so he may needed the money.

Eddie and Sam visit Perry and notice that his son Caleb (Matt Visser), who happened to be there with him, has a shiner. Perry asks him to go inside the house while he is interrogated about the drugs, but he denies knowing anything about it and asks the duo to leave his house.

After doing some research, they realize that the one having gambling problems was Caleb and that Perry had stolen the drugs to help him pay a debt he had with a loan shark named Melanie Ray (Karin Konoval). Eddie and Sam talk to Caleb and he lets them know that his father is helping him with that, so the duo visit Melanie in order to make an arrangement with her. Eddie asks her to rework Caleb’s terms of the loan and he will owe her a favor. That way, they may be able to convince Perry to return the drugs and Tyler would be free from all charges.

Christine visits Nico and offers him a deal in exchange of his brother’s safety, but the man declines the offer. Later that day, Tyler is walking on the street when Nico intercepts him and points a gun at him asking him for his drugs. Nico surrenders and takes him to Damien´s auto-body shop and tells him where the drugs have been hidden. When Nico finds it and is about to kill Tyler the DEA and Christine enter the place and are able to save Tyler.

Apparently, they planned the whole ambush once Perry had decided to give up the drugs, using Tyler as a bait to catch Nico. At the end of the day, Tyler agrees to testify against Nico and Sam has managed to make her sister agree to meet with her. It seems like everything has been back on track again.

For more adventures, don´t forget to watch “Take Two” next Thursday at 10/9c on ABC. ¡Hasta la próxima!