By Steve Cooper
Read by Alasdair Stuart
Six months ago, it was all sugar and no shit. Six months ago, in a private Istanbul club called Imshi, I’d snorted coke out of the shallow belly button of an ex-Soviet farmer’s girl, reared on Georgian corn, marinated in Belorussian vodka, garnished in best Turkish blow. Say what you want about the Eastern Orthodox Church, the college of bishops really knows how to throw a party.
The fat commission on that job, though, was running low, and now I was in Leeds, in a filthy hole of a club called Tiggers, leaning back against the bar with a little plastic bottle of water and watching the crowd. The boys were thin hungry jackals and the girls were glittering, animated sausage-meat. The place was slaughterhouse-romantic.
I’d come to meet a man on borrowed time. Horton had been borrowing time since 1673, and I had come to loan him a little more.
