Two hitmen, Lee Woods and mafioso Dosmo Pizzo, walk into a bedroom where a sleeping couple, Olympic athlete Becky Foxx and her ex-husband Roy Foxx, are in bed. Lee injects Becky with a tranquilizer and then shoots Roy in the head. Lee and Dosmo then drive to an abandoned area off Mulholland Drive, where Lee shoots Dosmo to set him up as the fall guy. Lee then blows up the car and flees the scene with his girlfriend, Helga Svelgen.
Dosmo survives, escaping the car and revealed to have been wearing a bulletproof vest. He takes shelter at the mansion of wealthy art dealer Allan Hopper, where he takes Hopper and his assistant Susan Parish hostage. Dosmo is unaware that Hopper has called his sister Audrey Hopper, a nurse, to come to the house. On her way, Audrey picks up Teddy Peppers, a down-and-out TV director contemplating suicide.
Meanwhile, Becky awakens and discovers Roy’s body in bed beside her. She runs from her house and flags down two policemen, young, ambitious Wes Taylor and cynical veteran Alvin Strayer, who are driving by. Although sympathetic, Wes begins to suspect that Becky knows more than she is saying. Becky had hired Lee and Dosmo to kill Roy for $30,000 but was unaware that they would do it in her own house. Alvin later returns to his home and becomes frustrated after his window is broken by a golfer. Later that night, after wrapping a birthday present for his son, he reads a letter from his department for his resignation, making him more frustrated.
Meanwhile, Lee goes back to the house to get the money and kills Creighton and Valenzuela, the homicide detectives working the crime scene. Wes then arrives to see if he can offer any insight on the case. Masquerading as one of the detectives, Lee lures Wes outside, and knocks him out. At Lee’s hotel, Becky and Helga argue and get into a fight, in which Helga is shot and wounded. Becky escapes with Helga firing after her. Helga finds her way to Becky’s house, where Lee decides to kill Helga instead of taking her to the hospital, concluding that her wound is too severe to be treated, but his gun jams. He turns to retrieve Wes’s gun but finds that Helga has escaped and has flagged down a passing car, where 2 people get out to try and help her. Another car approaches which happens to carry Dosmo and his hostages. Audrey jumps out and tries to help the dying Helga, but she dies on the roadside.
