With a snow flurry of cancer in his lungs and no one to live for, Roy Cady is a walking time-bomb of violence. Following a fling with his boss's lover, he's sent on a routine assignment he knows is a death trap. Yet after a smoking spasm of violence, Roy's would-be killers are mostly dead and he is mostly alive. Before he makes his getaway, he finds a beaten-up woman in the apartment, and sees something in her frightened, defiant eyes that causes a crucial decision: to take her with him on the run from New Oreans to Galveston, Texas.