Autumn, 1940: A black woman named Louise Blanc is found tortured to death in her Gentilly home. Sergeant Israel Daggett can't make anything of it until a Treasury agent arrives on the scene to let him know that Louise Blanc was the girlfriend of a bootlegger-turned-counterfeiter named Luis Martinez. On the other side of town, Wesley Farrell is looking for Martinez for his own reasons, but soon finds that his friend is up to his neck in hot water. He's on the run from the boss of his gang, a blonde Spaniard named Santiago Compasso, after having run off with the key to the operation—the painstakingly constructed plates that produce 20 and 50-dollar bills that are so good they've got the boys at Engraving and Printing jealous. Compasso's worried, not just because his operation's loused up, but also because he has someone of his own to answer to. Now Farrell's in a contest with Compasso to find his friend and discover the reason for his doublecross before Compasso's killer, a mysterious unseen psycho named Dixie Ray Chavez, can get there ahead of him.