Ana and her German Shepherd, Beau, are flying up I-85 in her old Jeep, toward a South Atlanta strip club, and a potentially deadly rendezvous with a sexual psychopath, nick-named Toots, for his love of cocaine and Tootsie Rolls. When her Jeep overheats, she stops at a crossroads convenience store, where she meets Dan, a heavily-medicated Vietnam Vet. Ana is thirty-four, gorgeous, dressed provocatively, and Jack falls hard. When she and Beau drive away, he hops on his Harley and follows.
Six weeks earlier, Ana daydreams at her desk in the newsroom of a major New York newspaper. She's just learned that she was nominated for the New York Press Club's Nellie Bly Award for investigative journalism.
Ana walks into a break room and meets a young photographer, Jimmy, who asks her to model for him, nude, on his fire escape. Jimmy says it's an art project he's working on for a soho gallery. Ana has fun with Jimmy, questioning his true motives; Jimmy fantasizes about a nude Ana.
Ana is summoned to the upstairs office of the Editor in Chief, Stevens, who informs her that they will travel together to the Nelly Bly Awards, share a room. Stevens, an asshole, is steamed that his wife manipulated a City Editor into giving Ana, a junior reporter, the assignment that won Ana the nomination. Ana ends their conversation by dumping a celebratory drink in Stevens' lap.
That evening, Ana receives a call from her Aunt Grace, who tells her that Ana's mother has had a stroke. Grace asks Ana to return home, to a small college town in North Georgia. Two weeks later, a call from from New York; an editor wants a writer for a piece on Jello Wrestling, a new fad sweeping southern nightclubs. That evening, Ana goes out to a local tavern and in a conversation with old friends, learns that the epicenter of Jello Wrestling is a strip club called Don T's Inferno in South Atlanta, a dangerous place. She's advised not to go there.
On her first visit to Don T's, Ana encounters a young tough named Wayne, who is tormenting Isa, a teen-aged Latina. When Ana strips to her bra and panties and climbs into a pool of Jello, taking Isa's place, she attracts the attention of Toots, who develops dark desires for her.
Don T's, in a previous life the restaurant of a Holiday Inn, is owned by Don Townsend, a former English Professor, undone by his love of coeds and illegal drugs. Don and Ana are talking in Dons' apartment, which occupies half of the 2nd level of the strip club, with a picture window that looks down into the club, when Don's phone rings: its Toots, who summons Ana to his limo, out in the parking lot. Toots threatens Ana and Isa with the most vile scenarios, blackmailing Ana in the process: To earn a chance to save Isa, Ana must return to Don T's every Friday night till Toots' birthday party, three weeks later. Ana, shaken, returns to Don's apartment, where he serves her aged bourbon laced with Ecstacy, a hallucinogenic drug that loosens inhibitions. He shows Ana an elaborate, very sexy gold costume, left behind by a stripper, that Ana will end up wearing on her return trips, as a headlining jello wrestler.
Ana is on her way to Don T's and Toots' party the night she meets Dan. When they reach Don T's, both learn the truth: Toots has planned an elaborate live sex show, with Ana and Isa as guests of honor, climaxing in a snuff film! But things go bad, and Ana, Dan, Beau, and a sympathetic maintenance man named Jesus, outwit Toots and his goons and escapee Don T's though a flaming conflagration. Ana and Isa, wearing only their shoes, led by Beau, Dan covering them with his 357 magnum.
The next morning, Ana wakes up in a large bed, her arm around Isa. She checks the other half of the bed-empty. She slips out of the bed in an over-sized t-shirt, walks to the kitchen, pours a cup of coffee, looks out a window, sees Dan loading a john boat with fishing gear. Beau, barking, leaps aboard.
Ana's eyes fill, and she almost smiles.
