Young Jimmy Quinn is delivering a bribe for the infamous racketeer Arnold Rothstein when a bomb goes off on Wall Street, killing thirty people and scaring every banker in the city right down to his spats. Twelve years later, Rothstein is dead, and Jimmy is doing his best to stay out of trouble, running a quiet little Manhattan speakeasy. At a particularly bad moment for him and his favorite waitress, a blast rocks the alley outside and draws him right back into the madness of a dozen years ago. That morning, a strange package came in with his liquor shipment: four plain books filled with cryptic numbers. It seems the motive behind this bombing may have been the same as that behind the explosion on Wall Street more than a decade ago: money. The incident sets Jimmy off on a mad race to stay out of the line of fire, taking him from the heights of the Chrysler Building to the depths of New York's underworld.