LaRoy, Texas

Ray, who operates his family-owned hardware store with his brother Junior in a small Texas town, gets from private detective Skip several photographs, taken by chance during a stake-out at a local motel, which indicate his wife Stacy-Lynn's marital infidelity. Distraught, Ray buys a revolver from a gun shop and drives to that motel. While Ray is contemplating suicide, a stranger gets into his car, apparently mistaking Ray for contract killer Harry, who is expected to meet him at the same motel around that time. The stranger hands over to Ray several thousand dollars as half the payment for somebody's assassination, which must be done next day, and leaves him, with a street address on piece of paper amongst the banknotes the only clue as to the target's identity. Harry arrives as Ray drives off. Still refusing to accept that there's anything the matter with his marriage, Ray is inclined to keep the contract money for financing a beauty salon which Stacy-Lynn wants to open; without a clear idea how to carry out a contract killing, he drives to the address and follows the man living there to a bar so clumsily that he's promptly "rumbled". The man forces Ray into his car, where a scuffle quickly develops between them and Ray shoots his opponent dead with the revolver. He dumps the corpse by the roadside, dropping accidentally one of Skip's photographs of Stacy-Lynn next to the body. On his way home he finds out from Junior's wife that the person Stacy-Lynn has been having an affair with is his brother (though he doesn't want to give much credence to that revelation).