Young J.T. Trainer was about to be killed for the life insurance money that would pay off his father's gambling debts. J.T.'s only friend, sixteen-year-old Hannah McGuire, discovered the plan and managed to get J.T. on a bus out of town before luring the killers in the other direction. J.T.'s last, fleeting glimpse of Hannah was of her racing off into the night with the gambler's enforcers hot on her trail.

Now, twenty years later, San Diego Homicide Detective J.T. Trainer is still searching for his vanished friend even as he investigates his latest case, the drive-by shotgun murder of an eleven-year-old child.