SYNOPSIS:

RYAN KUBINIK, 20's, joins the police force hoping to build a life and be a better father than his own dad, who beat and bullied him and his younger brother BILLY. He marries PAM and has a first child. 

Pam insists that they live in a comfortable suburb of New York, which lands Ryan in a tough beat just outside the city. He immediately begins to absorb the impact of the violence and human brutality he's in the middle of every day. Finally he reaches a crisis when he finds the corpse of a fellow cop's teenage daughter on the road—Ryan had let her off with a warning when she was driving drunk the night before. But he won't let the job get the best of him.

While working undercover with the DEA task force, Ryan busts and turns a local dealer named CARLOS, giving him the choice to go to jail or introduce him to his boss, the drug lord EMILIO, as someone looking for product to sell in the suburbs. Carlos makes the introduction, but Emilio is suspicious.

On a night off from work, Ryan meets and falls in love with DIANE, who prods him for details about his job and the pain it's caused him. He can't tell her everything, but she opens him up to the possibility of returning to full time civilian life. 

Emilio accepts Ryan only after forcing him to help pull cocaine out of the stomach of a murdered drug mule. For Ryan, it's a gruesome experience that will come back to haunt him—along with other moments of human brutality he's witnessed. He talks about his feelings only with Diane, stays undercover and sets himself up to take Emilio's operation down in a dramatic airport gunfight and large cocaine seizure.  

Ryan retires a hero, but not before witnessing and flirting with murder, torture, and criminal brutality that he will never forget. In his comfortable new civilian life, he starts to miss the excitement and danger of his job, and begins entertaining fantasies about dipping back in to the game to steal from safe houses where dealers hide their cash. It would be so easy, he speculates to Diane, who is horrified at the thought. Then one day he finally attempts it, and was quickly arrested for impersonating a DEA agent. The judge won't let him off easy, and he hits rock bottom, now a convicted felon. Diane finds Ryan alone at home, drunk and suicidal-- with a gun in his mouth, ready to pull the trigger. She demands honesty, and to know more about his inner struggle, and together they begin the journey of facing his PTSD.