Pete Malloy and Jim Reed took a leisurely walk to their patrol car on a mild November morning. Malloy was holding a large box in his arms, so Reed had to open the door for him. "Hey, what ya got there, Pete?" Reed asked with a smile.

Malloy shrugged. "I guess we'll find out," he said mysteriously, setting it in the back seat.

"Sure smells good," Reed said, sniffing the air and closing the door on his side of the car. They drove out of the parking lot. "One Adam-twelve, clear," he added.

"Well, if you really need to know, I asked my mother to whip up a pie for my Thanksgiving feast," Malloy said smugly.

Reed didn't really care, but he pretended to be interested. "Really? Huh," Reed said. "Gee, Pete, your mother must be one heck of a cook!" Malloy smiled at the compliment.

"Thank you," he said.

They rode on in silence for a while, before Malloy finally spilled, "I wanted to impress my girlfriend,"

"Oh," Reed said, confused. "…When?"

"That's why I asked my mother to make a pie!" Malloy shouted, exasperated. Reed was startled into silence.

"One Adam-twelve, one Adam-twelve, 459 in progress, see the man at 2794 Shirley Drive, 2794 Shirley Drive," announced the radio.

"One Adam-twelve roger," Reed replied, and the two sped to the rescue, just in time to see a bullet sail through the air and straight out the window of a quaint little store called Get 'Em 'Fore They're Popular, which seemed to only sell extremely un-popular things.

Reed and Malloy jumped out of the police car and stationed themselves on either side of the door. They listened hard; silence only.

After a quick nod to each other, they sped inside and pressed themselves against the wall so as not to be seen. There were lots of shelves and the burglar was obscured from the officers' vision.

They traveled down the unpopular aisles sneakily, ready at any moment to duck or to fire. Finally, after positioning themselves on either side of the sports aisle, Malloy turned to Reed and gave him a nod—the burglar was in sight.

Reed suddenly gasped—Malloy was holding the gigantic box containing his pie! "Pete," he whispered urgently, "Put that down! Pete, come on, why are you holding that?!" Reed had the wide-eyed and bewildered look of a small child. It made Malloy chuckle.

"Who's there?!" a voice cried, and somebody shot a bullet right where Malloy's hand had been a moment earlier. "Show yourself!"

Malloy leaned across the aisle to Reed and whispered loudly, "We'll pretend that it's just me, and then you can come around behind him—"

BANG!

Malloy fell to the ground, dead. He squashed his pie.

Reed, feeling sick, could only remember the time when Malloy had said to a crazy man with a gun and a baby, "Only give the baby back first so that you don't fall on it, and go outside so that you don't splatter the place up!"

Reed winced as he felt a gun pressed into his back. "Get up, pig," said a voice. "Oink, oink!"

….

It had been five days since Reed was kidnapped and Malloy killed. Right now he and the criminal were preparing for Malloy's funeral. "He'll want something near and dear to him to be buried with," Reed told the criminal. Reed really didn't have anything against this particular criminal—he treated him fairly, considering the fact that he was the kidnapped one.

"OH, HE WILL, WILL HE?" The criminal asked, shoving Reed to the ground. "AND WHAT," he snarled, "WOULD THAT BE?"

"Well…" Reed thought very hard. Would Malloy want his car? No; too big. His uniform? No; he was going to be wearing that anyway… "Hey!" Reed said, with a burst of inspiration, "How about that pie he was lugging around? I'm sure he'd like that!" Reed himself had always dreamed of being buried with a pie.

"Hmm…" the criminal growled. "…Okay. As long as you go and get it, your friend here can be buried with his pie." The criminal smiled.

"Sure," said Reed, and he jogged to the store. He walked inside and went to the place where Malloy had been shot. "Hey!" he yelled, "The pie's gone!"

"Excuse me, officer?" somebody clapped a hand on Reed's shoulder. "Are you all right, son?"
"Huh?" Reed said, confused. He turned around in a daze. "Who—who are you?"

"What you mean," corrected Roy DeSoto, "Who in the world stole Malloy's pumpkin pie?"

"It was pumpkin?" asked Reed.

The End