Frank Choate thinks he’s beat the odds and a disastrous past:  he’s an Ohio bank robber on a lucky streak—until one brave teller defies him by putting a dye pack in with the cash.  Things go from bad to worse as Frank finds himself involved with a woman whose ex-husband turns out to be a violent stalker, but worse can always come to worst when a smart, tough-minded FBI agent with her own haunted past puts Frank in her sights by setting a trap with an old lover from his past. 

SYNOPSIS:

Annie Cheng is a 40-year-old FBI agent whose marriage, love, and career in New York City grind to a halt in rapid order. First, she misses her lover dead in the Nine Eleven collapse of the South Tower far more than the husband who is divorcing her; next, her supervisor assigns her to a losing case in America’s poorest, most hopeless place—the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where she is assigned to investigate the high incidence of rape cases. Her time there, seen in flashback, culminates in a murdered woman’s broken body left like garbage beside a dusty road. From there, she has been assigned to the field office in Youngstown, Ohio, a Midwestern rust-belt city, and most recently been appointed Special-Agent-in-Charge of a series of bank robberies. One man with great discipline has taken down twenty-one banks in four years. The pressure on SAC Cheng to solve these crimes mounts, and by cracking them and nailing the Unknown Subject, she is hoping to return to the big city and the glamorous postings of a career she once loved.

Her nemesis is Frank Choate, a 30-year-old man raised by a violent biker father and former Vietnam vet and drug-dealer, who psychologically tortured his two sons and destroyed their mother. Older brother Jimmy follows in his father’s footsteps and winds up a member of the violent prison gang, the Aryan Brotherhood, serving time in Dannemora, New York for armed robbery. Frank, however, has tried to free himself of his sordid past despite his own criminal career choice. Frank even prides himself on using a fake gun in his bank jobs. But things are changing fast for him as well as his pursuer: first, he’s had an explosive dye pack inserted into the bag for the first time and that not only ruins his stolen swag but nearly gets him caught; secondly, his car breaks down on the interstate as he makes his escape across the state line from PA back to Ohio. Fate or luck or Frank’s own character—something Frank can’t control—puts him next to a woman in a Walmart parking lot. Frank hopes to get a ride home to his own sleazy trailer park (Paradise Park), whereas single-mom Candy just hopes to make a few bucks off Frank’s need for a ride. Instead of a ride, Frank is injured when Candy wrecks the car and winds up recovering in the woman’s home. This single mother of a damaged child and former lap-dancer is no ordinary woman, however. Candy heroically fights the odds herself but she is overmatched by poverty, a welfare bureaucracy, and a violent ex-husband who does not like the idea of another male usurping his place in what used to be his own house.

Frank has always kept himself free of entanglements since his upbringing in a crappy trailer park, where the only good thing he had was a teenage crush on a girl from there. But this girl, now a grown woman, is herself no stranger to bad luck because she has always wanted to be a “he,” and Frank’s loyalty to her is evident in his providing her with the money from his bank heists to enable her to have the expensive sex-change operation she desperately yearns for.

Another disastrous bank failure on top of the other puts Frank in very dire straits. Pressured by Martina, hoping to free himself from his dangerous occupation and start a new life with Candy and her son, he can only make it work if he completes one more big score. But Agent Cheng is determined not to let that happen. Furthermore, she has a plan and a solid lead to Frank straight from his criminal brother who betrays him. Another betrayal by Martina when Cheng applies pressure to her brings the federal agent and her reluctant partner that much closer to Frank as he plots his final heist. The question is whether the trap can be sprung before Frank makes good on his plan to rob a bank the agents themselves might be watching and before Candy’s psycho ex can snap. When the end comes, it brings out all the haunted memories of the two principals and ends their cat-and-mouse game in a bloody denouement that ripples outward o the other lives left in the wake of a predator and her prey.