Original airdate: October 23, 2008
It’s Randy’s birthday, so Earl decides to get him a car – a Ranchero, to be exact, since that’s what Randy’s always wanted, and one of Earl’s list items is that he never let Randy have something better than what Earl had. Earl parks the car outside the Crab Shack, but when he brings Randy out to see it, the car is gone (so Randy thinks Earl got him a parking space).
It turns out that local criminals Clyde and Bedbug stole the car, and Earl figures he can get it back without any problems, since there’s an unspoken rule that criminals don’t steal from other criminals. But when Earl tries to take his car back, Clyde and Bedbug tell him that he isn’t a criminal anymore, and he doesn’t get the criminal’s courtesy. They make Earl pay $1,500 for the car, but he decides it’s worth it to make Randy happy. Once again, though, when Earl brings Randy out to see the car, it’s gone.
Fed up with the situation, Earl decides that if the criminals are going to treat him like a regular civilian, then he’s going to act like one, so he goes to the police to report the stolen car. The inept Camden police, however, let word slip to Clyde and Bedbug that Earl snitched on them, and when Earl and an officer show up to reclaim the Ranchero, it’s nowhere to be found. Earl decides that the only way to get his car back is to steal something of Clyde and Bedbug’s to trade.
His plan doesn’t exactly go well; since he doesn’t remember how to hotwire a car, Earl steals the duo’s dog instead, but is caught by the exact same police officer who couldn’t help him before. All of the Camden underworld has shunned Earl because he became a snitch, but while at the police station Earl figures out that they’re all snitches, too. He tells on one criminal, which leads to a chain of events reaching all the way up to Camden’s version of the Godfather, an elderly crossing guard with an oxygen tank. Busted tattling to the police, he agrees to help Earl get back the car. Randy gets his birthday present, and the cycle of corruption continues in the Camden police department. Everybody wins.
