On a pleasure cruise in the Pacific, seventeen-year-old Susannah, her parents, seventeen-year-old cousin Martin, and eighteen-year-old crew member Axel face off against seventeen-year-old Jeremy, a drug lord's son, and hired killers Elwood and fifteen-year-old Shako.

Relates one momentous day in the lives of five young people in the San Francisco Bay Area, including two teenaged bank robbers, a witness, and a wounded military policeman just back from Iraq.