Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, a team of investigators, are hired to find a fourteen-year-old girl who's run away from her home in the suburbs. It's easy for Strange and Quinn to learn that the girl is now working as a prostitute in one of D.C.'s most brutal neighborhoods. Getting her to leave is harder. The two ex-cops think they know this world - but nothing in their experience has prepared them for the vengeance of Worldwide Wilson, the ruthless operator whose territory they are intruding upon.

Their mission is fractured by a violent criminal act against a young player from the neighborhood football team that Strange coaches. Tracking down the perpetrators becomes a point of honor for Strange and Quinn, and their investigation leads them deep inside the city's labyrinth of crime - and back, again, to the lethal Worldwide Wilson.