Santa Barbara, CA, a community of wealth and power. But Richard Bone, a beach-boy gigolo, his best friend Alex Cutter, a Vietnam veteran who has lost one arm, one leg and an eye in the war, and Mo, Cutter's alcoholic wife, are not among the rich and famous.
One night Bone happens to become the witness of a crime. In an alley he observes a man dumping a large plastic back. As it turns out the bag contains the body of a young girl. Bone believes to have spoted one of the community's most prominent citizens, oil-baron J.J. Cobb, and therefore thinks to better leave things as they are. His friend Cutter instead insists that the police would never take their word over that of a man of wealth and prestige. He seizes the opportunity to blackmail the killer, as a means of striking back at a system he thinks sent him off to an unjust war and ruined his life. But with all of Cord's power, and the trio's amateur extortion fumblings, it's soon unclear who is trapping who.