An aging but formidable strip club owner, Claudiu �Manco� Kapak, has been robbed by a masked gunman as he placed his cash receipts in a bank�s night-deposit box. Enraged, he sends his half-dozen security men out to find a suspect who is spending lots of cash and is new enough to Los Angeles not to know he was robbing a gangster. Their search leads them to Joe Carver, an innocent but hardly defenseless newcomer who evades capture and sets out to make Kapak wish he�d chosen someone else. Meanwhile, the real culprit, Jefferson Davis Falkins, and his new girlfriend Carrie seem to believe they�ve found a whole new profession: robbing Manco Kapak. Lieutenant Nick Slosser, the police detective in charge of the puzzling and increasingly violent case, has his own troubles, including worries about how he�s going to afford to send the oldest child of each of his two bigamous marriages to college without making their mothers suspicious. As this odd series of difficulties explodes into a triple killing, Carver finds himself in the middle of a brewing gang war over Kapak�s little empire, while Falkins and Carrie journey into territory more strange and violent than either had imagined.