Stardog

If Earl Patrick Godfrey can only make it across the bridge, there is a woman waiting. She calls herself Miranda Mtn., is double-jointed, tattooed from toes to navel, and has one blue eye, one brown. She's nothing like Diane, Earl's ex, whose voice of conscience he's been trying to escape since he stole the Ranchero 500 he lost to her in the divorce settlement. Earl just wants to take the "half car, half pickup" for one last sentimental spin to the Chippewa casino near the Michigan/Canada border and risk everything, one last time, in hopes of striking it rich.
Miranda Mtn., a dealer at the casino, slips him a straight flush worth twelve thousand, eight hundred and seventy dollars (after taxes) and then passes him a tight-folded, red-lettered note. "Check into Ojibway Hotel - rm. 411. Your name: Johnny Ace."
But there are ways and then there are ways of hitting it big, including some delirious sex in a beach house on Cape May, a wild night of roulette in Atlantic City, and a pistol-punctuated Thanksgiving (for Miranda's past stalks her as resolutely as Earl's past stalks him). With a comic/tragic urgency that both tantalizes and delights, Earl Patrick Godfrey speeds headlong into a surprising and final starlit scene of breath-stopping mystery and redemption. It's here, after a thousand dangerous and hilarious road miles - where all the voices of advice and complaint are finally silenced - that he has the last best word.