Kevin Mallaghan, aka Mally, has returned from Vietnam to job frustration manning a shovel at a Boston construction site. Introduced to Noles Dermody, head of a Boston gang, Mally’s penchant for planning and discipline allow him to thrive. But an unintentional murder sets him running from the vengeance of a Mafia Don, who has put a price on Mally’s head for his capture. Without a plan, Mally ends up at a religious commune in rural Colorado. Jenny Wechsler, a newly minted college graduate with a business degree is a frustrated typist and filing clerk in a shipping brokerage. A contract driver, Andy Keffler, suggests she ride with him trucking a large construction machine to rural Colorado. But after days on the road, Jenny characterizes the trip as whizzing past America, and Keffler leaves her in Colorado to get back home on her own. Good fortune and initiative get her a job as business manager for a growing Mexican Restaurant, Cantina Abramo. The restaurant’s owner wants to bring young, so-called cousins, into the US. He asks Jenny to figure out how to get them Green Cards so they don’t have to be hidden from the INS. That leads her to Moe Bishop who provides her with the fake cards, but always with a proposition for sex that Jenny firmly rejects. When Mally saves a “cousin” from the INS, it results in his meeting and becoming good friends with Jenny. Picking up a Green Card, Bishop attempts to rape Jenny. She manages to escape and when she tells Mally about it, he goes after Bishop, wounding him. But Bishop has gang connections and he fingers Mally at the Cantina for a Patriarca bounty hunter. Cornered, can Mally get away?