A cop is gunned down and unless Ricky Durrutti, a petty criminal with a short biography and a long rap sheet, can figure out who the real shooter is, he's a dead man. From Hunt's Donuts, opposite where the killing took place, to his room in the El Capitán Hotel, from the blue grass and steel Federal Building off Golden Gate Avenue to the Ritmo Latino record store, and from the Roxie Cinema on 16th Street to the Ramshackle Victorian homes of Treat Street where Lonely Boy lives--the chase is on. Salvadoreno gangs and Mexicans, cops and Jewish gangsters, drag queens and heroin addicts, speed freaks and low rent hookers, low-lives rising rising to the challenge of making sense of a murder. Out of the twentieth century of Nelson Algren and Charles Bukowski, here is the twenty-first century world of Peter Plate.