A woman and her friends break into her abandoned childhood home, where her mother went mad and nearly murdered as a child.

After receiving a bizarre series of encrypted messages, a group of kids embark on an adventure with an alien who needs their help.

Bill Racklin is a deputy sheriff in Greer County Oklahoma, the crystal meth capital of the region. His girlfriend leaves him because he's inattentive to her, but things look up when his high-school sweetheart, Annie Streets, returns home to care for her ailing mother. Annie's step-father, Buck Baker, is the local heartless rich guy, buying up farmland. On a stakeout, Rack and two other deputies arrest four men stealing fertilizer to make crystal meth; one of the four is the brother of a notorious Mexican drug dealer. The drug lord arranges Annie's kidnapping and holds her to ransom his brother. Rack and the deputies, prisoner in tow, head for Mexico to rescue her.

Two stories, 14 years apart, converge in a suburb of New York. Manuel Esquema, an international financier, whose face is badly scarred, is flying from Miami to help a New York politician negotiate a plea bargain with the Justice Department. Years before, this financier was a fresh-faced cabaña boy at a Miami Beach resort who fell in love with a young woman on holiday with her husband. The husband is now the pol, and he thinks he dispatched the cabaña boy long ago. What are Esquema's plans: revenge, mercy, or a complicated plan to seek again the woman's love?