After finding a lost key for a cashier's office in a large department store, a small-time criminal recruits four hoodlums to aid him in robbing the store's cash vault.

Monte Norris (Norman Budd), a small-time crook with a neurotic drive to rise to the heights of the law-breaking underworld, is flat broke and in disrepute with gangdom's big mobs. He finds a key to the chief cashier's office at a large department. He wants to handle the job alone but he boasts of his plans, and four other hoodlums cut themselves in on the robbery. Ther take is $500,000 but he and his confederates are unable to spend it since most of the bills are marked. As the tension in their hideout mounts, they fight among themselves and one of them is killed. Two other are killed in a police trap when they try to pass the money to a fence,Carlo Petrov (Grant Withers). Norris kills the remaining robber and goes to the apartment of his former girlfriend, Ronnie LaVerne (Penny Edwards), a nightclub singer who has served a short prison term because of a frame-up on her by Norris.—Les Adams <[email protected]>