Sam Spaulding is a tough, violent former war photographer with a Pulitzer Prize and a dead brother Henry who at one time ran one of the ugliest gangs in Los Angeles. Sam finds out he has Stage III intestinal cancer and decides to go out spitting in the face of death. But he reckons without his wife Lydia, who takes on her husband's fatalism with every ruthless weapon at her disposal. The skeletons in Sam's closet hardly help, when they come back to haunt him in the foul-mouthed ex-junkie Rudy Spavik and his angry girlfriend Sheri Ballin. From Los Angeles to the Mexican Baja, this unlikely foursome careens between hell and redemption, never entirely sure which is which. Until a nasty spat with Abe Smullen, the most beautiful drug lord in history, welds them together into a reluctantly indestructible clan.