Kevin Mallaghan, nicknamed Mally, has returned from Vietnam to job frustration manning a shovel at a Boston construction site. A high school friend introduces him to Noles Dermody, head of a Boston gang, and Mally’s penchant for planning and discipline allow him to thrive. But an unintentional murder sets him running from the vengeance of Rinaldo Patriarca, Boston Mafia Don, who has put a price on Mally’s head for his capture and return to Boston. Running without a plan, Mally turns up at a religious commune, Theotokos, outside of Holmanburg, Colorado. Jenny Wechsler is a newly minted college graduate with a business degree. But the best she can do for a job in her home town of Philadelphia is typist and filing clerk in a shipping brokerage. A contract driver, Andy Keffler, suggests she join him trucking a large construction machine to a site outside of Holmanburg. But after days on the road, Jenny characterizes the trip as whizzing past America, and Keffler leaves her in Holmanburg to get back to Philadelphia on her own. Good fortune and initiative get her a job as business manager for a growing Holmanburg Mexican Restaurant, Cantina Abrano. The restaurant’s owner, Armindo Abrano wants to bring young, so-called cousins, into the US so they can send money back to the family in Mexico. He asks Jenny to figure out how to get them Green Cards so they don’t have to be hidden from the INS, and that leads her to Moe Bishop. Bishop provides her with the Green Cards, but always with a proposition for sex that Jenny firmly rejects. Meanwhile, Mally has found a temporary home and a satisfactory life in Theotokos, and a good relationship with its founder and leader, Theoto. One afternoon he saves an Abrano cousin from being grabbed by the INS and it results in his meeting and becoming good friends with Jenny. On a visit to Moe Bishop to pick up a Green Card, Bishop attempts to rape Jenny. She manages to escape but is completely rattled by the experience. When she tells Mally about it, he goes after Bishop, wounding him. But Bishop has gang connections in Denver and it allows him to finger Mally for a Patriarca bounty hunter one evening at the Cantina. It takes a shootout for Mally to get away. Now he has to protect Jenny and leave Theotokos. It calls for a detailed plan for disappearing, and execution now.

Synopsis