A Ford Falcon sits parked outside a bank in a fifteen minute parking spot and the clock is quick ticking toward the fifteen-minute mark. That’s because the owner of the cruddy old car and his friends—including narrator Ed Kennedy—are trapped inside a bank where a particularly incompetent robber is taking his sweet time. Finally, the robber is ready to make his getaway and demands the keys to the Falcon from its owner, Marv. Things move quickly and very weirdly from that point and before too the robber is proving himself equally inept at the skill of opening a locked door and there is a gun left behind on the sidewalk.
For reasons he can’t quite understand, Ed makes a run for it and picks up the gun, racing for the Falcon and pointing the pistol right into the face of the robber. Before too long, the Falcon’s windshield is shattered, the cops arrest the robber and the media turns nineteen-year-old underage aimless taxi driver Ed Kennedy briefly into a hero.
A few days the first mysterious playing card arrives in the mail with no return address. It is an Ace of Diamonds and contains three addresses with three different times of time day. Unsure of what the deal is, but driven for reasons he can’t explain to explore the great vast unknown, Ed goes to the first address to see what is all about. Nothing he expected might be there could exceed what is there: a first-hand eyewitness peek into a man raping a woman who turns out to be his wife. Ed, a coward at heart, turns around and goes home before trying another of the addresses. This one turns out be another peek into another life: that of a lonely old woman serving herself tea in her kitchen. Her name is Milla and she’s been waiting for a man named Jimmy to return for decades and Ed is easily able to convince he is that man. The third address brings him into contact with a young girl named Sophie with dreams of being a track star who runs barefoot every morning. The gift of an empty shoebox does not transform her into a winner in her races, but does endow her with a newfound confidence.
And so does it with Ed who decides to go back to the first house with a little less cowardice and a little more empowerment. Of course, the arrival of a gun with a single bullet in it through the mail doesn’t hurt, either. Ed doesn’t kill the rapist, but does threaten him and leave him with a choice of leaving town or worse. The rapist opts for the former.
The next playing card is an Ace of Clubs, but it does not arrive mysterious in the mail. Instead, one night he is confronted by two men wearing masks inside his apartment. They give him a beating, a letter of congratulations for dealing with the Ace of Diamonds and an Ace of Clubs on which is written a Confucius-like clue. As Ed goes about discovering the various missions that come his way via the playing cards, he is also longing with love from his friend Audrey who only sleeps with guys she hates because as a victim of sexual abuse she doesn’t want to associated sex with love. Ed confesses to her that he didn’t kill the rapist, but merely threatened him into leaving town.
Meanwhile, Ed’s missions to help others through the intervention ranges from something as simple as buying ice cream for a single mother he witnesses buy ice cream for her children but not herself to prove her struggle is appreciated to getting enough congregants to fill an empty church for a priest who eschews the good life of superchurches in order to actually amongst the poor to who he ministers to buying new Christmas lights for a family that decorates every year with broken ones.
The missions are not just helping others, but also helping Ed. He is beginning to see there can be a purpose to lie and that it makes one feel good to make others feel good. Then he winds up in a restaurant where his mother is on a date just six months after his father died. Even worse: she’s been seeing the guy since before his father died. The showdown is dramatic and hurtful as Ed learns just how big a disappointment he really has been to his mother and entire family.
The last Ace contains the titles of three movies and the movies have elements which all correspond to the name of his friends. (Roman Holiday stars an actress named Audrey, for instance.) Ed is terrified because he doesn’t know what darkness is going to be illuminated about his friends. This could lead to another rapist as easily as another barefoot track star, after all. As it turns out, Ed learns the real reason why Marv kept driving that cruddy old Falcon and was just generally miserly even though he claimed to have socked away thirty-thousand dollars in the bank. He also realizes that it is time to stop overlooking the even greater slackerdom of his friend Ritchie and confront him with the ugly truth of his life: he’s an absolute disgrace to himself. As for Audrey, he must confess at last his love her in an attempt to break through the wall she has constructed successfully obstructing her from men she cares about.
Riding high on that last success, Ed’s cab is hailed by a man who turns out to be the bank robber after having had Ed drive him around to each of the places in which he has carried out his missions on the cards. The robber instructs Ed to return to his home and when Ed gets there he finds a stranger who claims to be the man who send the cards. Even more astonishing is that he stranger claims to have constructed everything which Ed has gone through. He claims to have committed horrible acts and disrupted multiple lives and even ensure Ed’s ineptitude as a cabbie—all for the sake of proving that if someone as useless as he could rise to the occasion, live beyond his capabilities and be a force for good in the world, then anybody could. He even wrote it all down…even the conversation that is taking place right there in his apartment.
Days later, Audrey arrives at the shack Ed calls home asking if she can stay. Not just for the night, but for good. He picks up the folder left behind the stranger and begins flipping through it. When Audrey asks what he’s looking for, he say he is looking for where the stranger wrote down the part of his life taking place at that moment, there, when she arrives and they are together.
Later, he smiles, realizing that his role in all this craziness hasn’t been that of a messenger, but rather that he is the message.
