 Toma and three other cops are on stakeout in a particularly dangerous Los Angeles neighborhood. One of the cops, in the back seat of a car, has a six-round assault rifle. A thug is chased by Toma and one of the other officers, stops in front of the officer with the machine gun and takes the entire magazine in one burst -- the officer "froze" while pulling the trigger. The dead man, who was black and unarmed, is held up as a martyr and the cop is put on a departmental hearing that could get him dismissed from the force, or worse. Although the cop accompanying Toma on the chase, an elderly man, is cleared of screaming a racial epithet (because his voice is so damaged there is no way he could have shouted it at the volume a witness says he did), that doesn t clear the back-seat cop of the charge of shooting an unarmed man -- until Toma does a double take at the autopsy report which shows the the man was hit SEVEN times by the burst, even though only the six slugs were recovered from his body. What caused the seventh wound? Toma s task is made urgent after the cop is shot (his ultimate survival is left unclear) and he must try to stop the gunman from starting a racial mob war. Story by the real David Toma.