Miss Nike Ajax

"God help the SOB who tries to come through that door tonight."
Ruby Danes is sitting in a motel room off Azalea Garden Road with a bottle of Scotch and a .38 special, spinning Jack Kerouac's fountain pen on the nightstand and wondering how the last two weeks happened. Ruby's on a cross-continent roll that began from the dust hills of New Mexico up to Denver, where the hunt for her flimflam father ends at a murder scene that's got frame-up painted all over it. She high-tails it to St. Louis, where she falls in with one Danny Mint, a pickpocket who's just pinched a hot wallet hiding a mystery brass key - a key that sends the pair down the Mississippi to Memphis and then - of all the damn places - Norfolk, Virginia. Too bad this is October '62, when the town's dead in the atomic crosshairs of a nest of Russian missiles hissing away in the Cuban jungle while a gang of drug runners out in Virginia Beach want Ruby's secret. Oh yeah, along the way Ruby discovers what really happened in Roswell and might just manage to save the world.