SYNOPSIS

Milo Mad (31) tends bar at Dead Letter, a graffitied dive with a small stage in New Orleans. She has also been the private arrangement of the man who owns it — Aimé Beaumont, a mid-level operator whose businesses run other people's cash — for six years. He pays for her apartment. He put her behind that bar. He leaves twenties on her counter on his way out the door, which she keeps in a kitchen drawer and never spends. She is a heroin user, functional and exact about it, and the film opens on her performing that ritual at her kitchen table while her own voice, flat and instructional, narrates the procedure like a manual.

The only thing she chose in her apartment is a skateboard by the door. Some nights at three in the morning she takes it to an empty parking garage and rides down four levels of concrete, alone, which is the only hour of her day nobody paid for.

Her oldest friend is Tom Vomit (34), who tends bar beside her, drives her to work every shift, and has loved her for as long as either of them has been in New Orleans. He named himself at nineteen in a band that no longer exists and has looked exactly the same ever since. Their intimacy is total and entirely unconsummated; they eat off each other's plates at a Waffle House at three in the morning and argue about whether he should take the nine paid shows his friend Paul Poop keeps offering him.

Then Aimé hires Ophelia Wren (22) to work the bar, and Milo watches her own replacement happen in public, on a printed schedule taped inside the office door. Fridays become Thursdays. Thursdays become Mondays. Aimé's hand, which used to rest on Milo's shoulder as he passed behind her, now rests on Ophelia's instead. The week's credit card tips arrive in envelopes with names on them, and Milo's gets thinner. One night after close, she watches Ophelia get into Aimé's idling car across the street, and when the room is empty, she throws a stack of jelly jars into the wall, then gets the broom and sweeps up every piece herself.

Milo also knows what moves through that building. She counts the drawer; she’s seen deposits that don't match the take. She has served coffee to Aimé and his wife, Poppy Beaumont (52), while they sat at a four-top and planned the purchase that three hundred thousand dollars in cash is for — a deal closing on a Thursday, part of it other people's money, with a man named Balthazar somewhere above them who does not accept explanations. They did not lower their voices. Milo has never been a person anyone lowers their voice around.

On closing night, Ophelia comes out of the office pleased and shy and asks Milo to fasten a new gold bracelet on her wrist. Milo does it. Her own sleeve rides up: the same bracelet, six years older. Then Aimé calls her back to the office and conducts the end of her life as a payroll matter — the apartment lease isn't being renewed, her shifts are her shifts, five thousand dollars counted onto the desk, twice squared. He asks if she'd like to say anything. She says no. He tells her to leave her keys. She does. She stands up to go. Then, with his back turned as he fits a cash box into the safe, he reaches behind him without looking and asks her to hand him something. The nearest thing on the desk is his own revolver, which he set down a few minutes earlier to get the money underneath it.

She shoots him once. Then she empties the safe — a gym bag of banded hundreds, an envelope, and a cloth-bound notebook she does not open — takes her keys back, straightens the wedding photograph on his desk so it faces out square the way he kept it, turns off the light, and closes the door.

Tom is in the car outside with the stereo up, forty feet and two walls away, playing air drums. She gets in and says, "Drive." On the way, she tells him a version of the truth: she left Aimé, she took what he owed her, she needs to disappear. Tom, who has worked in that building for years and knows exactly whose money that is, says yes before she finishes — partly out of love, partly because it is the most interesting thing anyone has ever asked him to do. He knows where his ex-stepfather hides the key to a beach house on Folly Beach, outside Charleston, empty until Easter. They stop at his place for clothes and a guitar he hasn't played in years, and at hers for a duffel, her works, and the board. She leaves the bracelet in the kitchen drawer with six years of his loose twenties.

By 3:12 that morning, Poppy cannot reach her husband. She has keys to everything. She finds him, and she does not call the police — a murder in that office exposes the business, the deal, and the ledger her entire life is written in. She makes one call. Two men in matching navy jumpsuits, both named Chet, arrive with the van. By daylight the office is a room again, the wall is a slightly different color, and Aimé Beaumont has gone out of the country on business. Poppy tells the manager that story, sends him to work the bar himself, and then hires a private investigator — Malachi Moonshadow (55), cheap jacket, resoled shoes, four hundred dollars a day — to find a woman and bring back a bag. She does not mention that her husband is dead. She does not mention the notebook. Everything she tells him is true.

Milo and Tom sleep a day at a motel in Mississippi and reach Folly Beach in February: gray, shuttered, wind moving sand across an empty street. The house is on stilts, full of somebody else's furniture and a wall of somebody else's family photographs. Tom isn't in any of them.

What follows is ten days of two people in a borrowed house with three hundred thousand dollars on the kitchen table. Tom fixes the heater, buys a record player and a lamp, learns which grocery has the good bread, and is the happiest he has ever been. Milo walks into the freezing Atlantic fully dressed for no reason anyone can explain. She rides her board across an empty strip mall parking lot at dawn, can’t land a kickflip, and keeps trying. Every morning she searches New Orleans news on her phone and finds nothing — no body, no name, no story — and has no one on earth she can ask why. The only message she receives in ten days is from Ophelia, asking if she's okay.

And Milo begins, quietly, to build an exit that does not include Tom. She recounts the money herself in eleven minutes. She learns that you don’t buy a false identity from a friend of a friend. So she buys what she can actually get: a car off a stranger's lawn on James Island, paid in hundreds, titled to a name that isn't hers, parked at the back of a shopping center lot three miles away. She reads the notebook she took from the safe — thirty years of Poppy Beaumont's bookkeeping, in Poppy Beaumont's handwriting — and understands in about twenty minutes what she is holding, because she is the only person in that operation who ever counted anything. She hides it in the spare tire well of a car nobody knows exists.

Tom, meanwhile, calls Paul Poop to turn down the nine shows, and because lying to a friend would be strange, he says where he is.

That is all Moonshadow needs. A week of buying beers in New Orleans produces a surname and an island; a county property search produces an address; two days parked past the last mailbox produce a brown Caprice, a man taking out the trash, and a woman standing on a deck looking at the ocean. He calls his client. She tells him to sit on it and doesn’t tell him she is already driving.

He takes Milo alone in a Walmart parking lot and lays out what he has worked out: a man who left the country without a flight, a card, or a phone; two bartenders who vanished the same night; a woman who has been on this island ten days and has never once asked anybody where that man went. He isn’t going to the police, because nobody called them ten days ago, and he’s thought about that more than he’s thought about her. He asks if any of it bothers her. She says no. Then he tells her the thing that reorganizes her entire situation — his client knew her husband was dead before she hired him — and that his client is on the road with two men in coveralls, and that Milo has about a day left. His offer is simple: half the bag, and he'll report the house empty. Room nine, tonight.

Milo goes home and forces a fight with Tom, because the only favor she has left to do him is get him out of that house. She succeeds. He drives north without taking the money she offered him.

At dusk, she counts out half the bag into a grocery sack for Moonshadow, sets it on the table, looks at it for forty minutes, and puts every bill back. She is not paying a hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars for a head start she can take for free.

Poppy arrives before she can leave — a van in the sand, a woman in a good coat coming up wet stairs, two large men behind her. She sits down at the table, notes that half an hour earlier she'd have missed her, and asks for the notebook. Milo tells her it is somewhere; that's fine as long as she is fine. Poppy does not negotiate. She has driven twelve hours, and she wants the only thing in the world she'd trade the money for, and she has a man put a pistol against the side of Milo's head.

The front door opens, and Tom Vomit stands there holding a four-dollar record player belt he drove back to deliver.

He crosses the kitchen. Chet #1 shoots him. Poppy, who has not moved, expresses irritation. The pistol is no longer against Milo's head, and Milo takes a .380 out of her jacket — bought from a dealer in North Charleston during an argument about whether Peter Pan is a superhero — and shoots Chet #1 twice in the middle, and then shoots Poppy Beaumont across the kitchen table from four feet away.

The second Chet takes the gym bag off the table and walks out with it. He gets twenty feet from the van before Moonshadow, who came to collect and never went up the stairs, steps out from behind the Caprice and shoots him in the back of the head, picks up three hundred thousand dollars, looks at a lit kitchen window he cannot see into, and drives home.

Milo hears that shot and does not look up. She sits on the kitchen floor with Tom for a long time. Then she washes her hands and her forearms, straightens his jacket where it has ridden up so that it lies flat, and turns off the light.

She drives Tom's car to a shopping center, moves her duffel and her board into a car titled to a woman who doesn't exist, and leaves the island with a notebook under the spare tire and no money at all. She got away with everything. It cost her the only person who loved her, and she is poorer than she was the night she started.