Scott Weiss is a weathered private investigator based in San Francisco, an ex-cop with a basset hound’s face. He’s holed up in a hotel room, thinking of the girl he should have left alone and waiting for the Shadowman, the hitman he knows is stalking him. Jim Bishop is a young, good-looking livewire with a taste for violence, drugs and loose women. Bishop is holed up too, three-days-drunk with the blonde who nearly killed him on his mind and the cops on his tail.