The driver is a teenaged girl named Guadalupe who signs to her deaf brother sitting in the passenger seat, but Dan, in his grief and rage, interprets the signing as gang-related hand signals. He tries to strangle the girl, but the police pull him away and put him in handcuffs. Later, he stalks the girl and nearly succeeds in killing her.

Dan loses the one thing he has left; he loses his faith. At each of the last funerals, he had given a check for a thousand dollars as a donation to the local church, but this time he tears up the check underneath the priest's nose and walks away.

He becomes morbidly depressed, he doesn't eat or sleep properly, he starts his mornings with vodka and orange juice, and his symptoms of heart disease return. He sees no hope and so begins to drive east from L.A. with a view to killing himself in the hills south of El Paso. We journey with Dan into the darkest reaches of his despair. In lesser hands, the reader might have given up all feeling for such a character, but Toole sustains our empathy, and soon we find ourselves moving with Dan out of the darkness. It begins when Dan nearly runs down a dog on the highway, and finding that it is starved and ill, he carries it to his car. His own redemption begins when he himself commits an act of redemption.

Running in counterpoint to Dan's journey is the story of "Chicky" Garza, a light-skinned Tex-Mex youth who has the discipline and the drive to go pro. He got his start training with his grandfather, Eloy, The Wolf, but now he trains with Trini and Paco. This pair is nothing like Dan and Earl. They are competent trainers, but all their "juice" comes in bottles and syringes, and their clients include Eloy, who has become a serious morphine addict.

Trini and Paco set Chicky up to fight Psycho Sykes, touted as the next Mike Tyson, backed by two white lawyers with more money than smarts. They see Sykes as an Olympic contender and a good investment. But anyone who knows boxing can see that Sykes is just a street fighter with a few extra moves; he doesn't have what it takes to box pretty. This becomes apparent even to the lawyer promoters when they watch Chicky fight in a preliminary match and realize that it may well be Chicky who advances to the nationals. So they fix the fight.

With some cash under the table, Trini makes Chicky's passbook disappear; the boy isn't allowed to fight and Sykes wins on a walkover. Chicky doesn't understand, but his grandfather knows full well that something dirty has happened. He confronts Trini about the fix but can't do anything about it, not so much because he is dependent upon Trini for his supply of morphine as from shame that Chicky might find out about his habit. Trini and Eloy work out a deal that sees Chicky leaving town for a while. And so begins the novel's other journey. Chicky drives west from Texas to L.A. with cash from his grandfather and a piece of advice: look up Dan Cooley.