 Ben Archer, a club owner and gangster from Marseille, France, returns to L.A. after doing another job for his wheelchair-bound boss and good friend Max. But Ben tells Max that he is tired and wants out of his job with Max s gang. Ben wants to live a normal life with his son Nicholas and wife Cynthia. Cynthia is a social worker for the INS, and she s working to prevent the organized flow of illegal Chinese immigrants into the USA. In a raid on a shipping vessel one night, Cynthia finds a 14-year-old girl named Kim amongst the distraught immigrants, and takes pity on her. Cynthia convinces her cold-blooded boss, INS agent Mac Hoggins, to allow her to take Kim home with her for the night and to meet Tommy Li and Mamma Li, the Chinese foster parents who raised Cynthia. What Cynthia doesn t know is that Kim holds a grave danger to Cynthia and her family. Unknown even to Kim, Kim s father is Sun Quan, a powerful Chinese Triad leader. Sun Quan is the man that Kim saw murder her mother before Kim came to the USA. Sun Quan is obsessed with finding Kim. And he ll stop at nothing to find her. Upon his arrival in L.A., Sun Quan is told by Hoggins that Kim is with Cynthia. As it turns out, Hoggins is helping Sun Quan smuggle heroin into the country, using some of the Chinese immigrants as mules. The next day, while Ben is at work, Cynthia, Tommy, and Mamma Li are brutally murdered at the Li family s restaurant by Sun Quan and his men. Only Kim and Nicholas, who were in the other room, manage to escape and run away to Max s house. When Ben arrives at the restaurant, he sees the men with guns leaving the restaurant, and Ben also sees Andy Wang, a drug dealing partner of Sun Quan. After an exchange of bullets, Ben runs into the restaurant and sees the bodies. Ben is understandably inconsolable over Cynthia s death. Ben is also furious. He wants to find Kim and Nicholas, and make someone pay for the murders of Cynthia, Tommy, and Mamma Li. Ben finds Nicholas at Max s house, and Max and his associates Tony and Raymond are more than willing to help Ben figure out who killed Cynthia. Ben and Tony discover that Andy runs a brothel downtown, so they go to the brothel, where Ben kills Andy by shooting him point-blank in the face -- with a shotgun. Then Ben, Tony, and Raymond kidnap Hoggins and take him to Max. Ben and Max have Raymond use a large power drill to torture Hoggins into confessing that it was Sun Quan who had Cynthia killed, and that Sun Quan is Kim s father. Hoggins also admits that he told Sun Quan where to find Kim. Absolutely livid at Hoggins for causing the murders, Max and Ben have Raymond kill Hoggins by using the drill on Hoggins s head. Sun Quan later has Max and Raymond killed, and has Kim and Nicholas kidnapped. Ben manages to rescue Kim, but the kidnappers escape, with Nicholas as Sun Quan s hostage. Ben and Tony head to the docks to rescue Nicholas. Ben will do whatever it takes to get Nicholas away from Sun Quan. And to do it, Ben will have to leave behind a wake of death on his way to a confrontation with Sun Quan.