Dinah Hunter is an advertising executive in Los Angeles who quits after a heated dispute with a client and comes home to find her boyfriend in the swimming pool with another woman. Frustrated by his constant philandering, she decides to start over and takes a cross‑country drive to New York City to reclaim her old job. Along the way, she picks up a young man, Bobby Ray, and his pregnant girlfriend Lola, hoping for a little companionship and a fresh start.
That night, tragedy strikes when Bobby Ray and Lola rob Dinah, stealing her car and purse. Stranded and with no money or identification, she wanders into an empty bar and asks Dan Oldum to call the police. The bartender makes a violent advance, attempting to rape her, and Dinah defends herself. A responding officer, Deputy Burt, arrives and, swayed by Oldum’s lie, believes that Dinah attacked him. Without a clear trail or witnesses, she is arrested and taken to the Jackson County jail.
The following day, Dinah shares a cell with Blake, a drifter she had seen during an earlier car accident. Sheriff Dempsey explains that, until identity can be verified, she will remain in custody. That evening, the night jailer, Deputy Hobie, assaults Dinah in her cell. After he finishes, she defends herself with a wooden stool and ends up killing him. Blake manages to reach through the bars, grab Hobie’s keys, unlock both cells, and pull Dinah outside to steal Hobie’s pickup.
Sheriff Dempsey witnesses the escape and pursues in vain, only to collide head‑on with a drunk driver, dying in the crash. Blake drives with Dinah to a run‑down barn where his friends help them hide and Dinah clean up. When Bakersfield police show up to demand surrender, Blake’s friends hold off the officers with machine guns, allowing the couple to slip away in the pickup.
Across open pastures and dirt roads, they find a remote ranch house to shelter in for the night. News reports reveal that Dinah and Blake are both wanted for Hobie’s death. Dinah contemplates turning herself in, but Blake explains that, given the circumstances and the taint of the local police—who would not believe her self‑defense story—she could face a harsh fate with little chance of a fair trial. He counsels that her life as a fugitive might be the safer, if bleaker, option. Dinah weighs this grim calculus but chooses to press on with Blake.
The next morning, a shotgun‑wielding rancher confronts them, and Dinah reluctantly defuses the threat by disarming him and knocking him unconscious. The duo escapes again in the pickup, but a police helicopter spots them. The Fallsburg police chief—Hal Needham—orders a roadblock, using a tractor‑trailer to seal the route. Dinah is wounded in the shoulder as she tries to outrun the trap. Blake fights to shield her, but he is fatally shot in town, toppled over a standing flag and dying on the American symbol of its history and heartache.
Dinah is left badly hurt, carried back in the back seat of a car to the town jail as the town pulls itself together for a somber, unresolved ending. The film closes on a stark, downbeat note, underscoring the price of violence, the fragility of safety, and a woman’s struggle to survive in a world where truth and due process feel out of reach.
