Hired along with Joe Pike to investigate the alleged kidnapping of a wealthy industrialist's son, Elvis Cole goes undercover to infiltrate a ring of professional border kidnappers only to be abducted himself.

Nita Morales has hired Elvis Cole and Joe Pike to find her missing adult daughter. Nita has received a ransom call, but believes it to be fake and that her daughter has merely run off with her boyfriend. But she is wrong. The girl and her boyfriend have been taken by bajadores, bandits who deal in drugs, guns, and human trafficking. Going undercover to find the couple, Cole himself is taken and disappears. Now it's up to Pike to find his friend, but it may already be too late.

When the police tell a wealthy industrialist that her missing son has faked his own kidnapping, she hires Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, and Cole soon determines that it was no fake. The boy and his secret girlfriend have been taken, and are now lost in the gray and changing world of the professional border kidnappers, who prey not only on innocent victims but also on one another, buying, selling, and stealing victims like commodities.