Richard Richard visits Beverly Beverly, a local prostitute, and runs into her police officer boyfriend Ryan on the way into Beverly's home. The tense confrontation that follows ends in a brutal misstep as Richard accidentally shoves Beverly through a window, killing her. In a cool, mechanical response, he cleans up the scene, evades Ryan when he returns from errands, and hitchhikes to New York City after disposing of Beverly's body. What begins as a panicked escape quickly evolves into a chilling, self-justifying linger of crime and compulsion, setting Richard on a path that blends calculated risk with a creeping sense of invincibility.
Richard moves into a dingy motel, takes a job at a bottling company, and forges a wary camaraderie with Candice Candice, a neighboring drug dealer. He also starts spying on Nancy, a prostitute who lives across from Candice, drawing himself into a nocturnal underworld where danger hides behind every doorway. The thrill from Beverly's death begins to mutate into something colder and more deliberate as Richard murders a woman named Lucy Lucy, torturing and humiliating her before the act, a turning point that marks his descent from panic into a ruthless pattern of violence. Meanwhile, Ryan, increasingly suspicious of Beverly's disappearance, travels to New York to hunt for answers, enlisting the aid of local police and circulating photographs of Beverly in clubs and bars. A radio broadcast announcing that Beverly's remains have been found nudges the investigation forward, and Ryan locates Richard in a restaurant before tracing him to his motel.
At the motel, the tension crescendos as Richard clashes with Candice and ends up killing her—and her dog—in a brutal, escalating altercation. Ryan discovers Candice's corpse and, peering through a window Richard smashed earlier to fling out Candice's dog, notices Richard in Nancy's apartment. Nancy fights back with a straight razor, aided by a pair of pimps, as violence closes in from every side. In a final, swift confrontation, Ryan intervenes, seizing Richard and hurling him out a window to his death, ending a spiral of violence that began with a single, inadvertent shove and spiraled into a doomed, fatal reckoning.
