Dead Girl Beach by Mike Sullivan

hustle and bustle of large crowds moving about the city. There, he could feel totally free, again.
    A week ago, he had purchased a ticket off the island. The speedboat ride over to Koh Samui Island, with the only available airport in the area, took thirty minutes. Inside the airport bathroom was where the trouble started. One bulky brute emerged from a stall and punched his face hard and cracked two ribs with fierce body blows. The other man—wearing a black, shiny suit—stood lookout at the front door to prevent anyone from entering. The man who punched his face—a blocky, short-armed gangster from Hong Kong—spoke to him in a deep, dark, and threatening voice .
    â€œThis comes from Bennie. You know Bennie…huh?”
    He knew Bennie. Bennie Zee. Everyone on Koh Phangan Island knew Bennie Zee.
    â€œWell, this message is from Bennie. You have one week to come up with the money.”
    Bennie’s spies were everywhere. He’d regretted buying the plane ticket to Changmai. At the last minute, he’d cancelled it and lost his money on a non-refundable ticket. Plus, he also had to write off the ticket over to Koh Samui Island. Arun had lost big time all around, with nothing left to show for his efforts. All he ended up with that dreary day was a bloody face, a black eye, some cracked ribs, and the ominous warning:
You have one week to come up with the money.
    Arun Songsiri, a thirty-four-year-old ex-con and gambling addict, had lived a paltry life crowded into the dim lights and stale smoke of gambling dens on Koh Phangan Island. His game was Chinese Mahjong. The game was developed in 500 BC and connected in some way to the Great One, Confucius, who was fond of birds, which would explain the name, meaning sparrow.
    The game usually had four players. Each player received a hand of thirteen tiles with a winning hand coming from four or five melds—a meld being a set of matching tiles). As luck would have it, Arun always came up one or two melds short of a winning hand. He had borrowed heavily from anyone insane enough to loan him money, and over a short period of time, sank deeper into debt. Being a survivor, Arun adapted to a new life of by dodging his creditors and learning to live on very little.
    Two bowls of rice a day and maybe some
platua
—Thai tuna fish—if he could get it, was all he ever needed. Last week, just as his dreary life seemed at its lowest point, a one thousand baht note borrowed from his sister Suma sent his spirits soaring into the stratosphere.
    Arun sat on the curb of a deserted street that day beyond the cabin he shared with Suma. The bicycle lotto vender drove by. The vendor, a fat man wearing shades and a Baltimore Orioles baseball hat, stopped and peered down over the handlebars at Arun.
    â€œWant lotto ticket?” he asked Arun, speaking to him in Thai.
    Of
course
, he wanted a lotto ticket. What did he look like sitting outside on a hot sweltering sidewalk on a day most sane people were indoors?
    â€œOf course I want lotto tickets. What the hell do you think I’m doing out here? I’m waiting for your ass to swing by. Let me see the board.” The lotto man handed it over gingerly to him with a startled look on his face.
    With careful thought, Arun chose numbers that coincided with his birthday: 12-5-77. Combinations of 1, 2, 5, and 7. He waited all night with a premonition bubbling in his veins like boiling water, that something good was about to happen in his wretched, tormented, miserable, meaningless life—there weren’t adjectives enough to describe the way he felt. The next day, as he checked the papers, 2-5-7 had come up big. Out of millions of numbers, out of millions of number combinations, 2-5-7 was drawn, and the lotto was worth $200,000.00.
    Although winning lotto was something to celebrate, it caused yet another problem. That amount of money meant that he could only pay one creditor, while the others would have to wait