Insurance investigator Joe Peters (McGraw) and his partner Harry Miller (Louis Jean Heydt) solve a lucrative recovery case and prepare to fly home.

She makes it quite clear she loves the finer things in life, which "Honest Joe" (as Diane calls him) cannot possibly afford on his small salary of $350 per month.

Their mutual attraction flares up and Joe, in order to finance a dream life with Diane, decides to use inside information on a cash shipment of $1.25 million to set up a robbery for Webb in return for one-third of the take.

Desperate, Joe arranges to meet Webb on a desolate stretch of highway by telling him he has a plan to get them out of their mess.

"[3] According to film critics Bob Porfiero and Alain Silver, the screenwriters took a hard-boiled mystery plot and combined it with "an aura of middle-class malaise and pervasive corruption to provide a motivation for Peters' alienation and fall."

The noir notion of entrapment is illustrated by the staging of Peters' death in the semi-dry Los Angeles riverbed, and it is one of the early scenes of a car chase filmed there.