No More Heroes Read Online Free PDF

might have to hike it all to fuck, mind.”
    “Cash good for you?”
    “Always good,” he says, bagging and twisting. “Never took a cheque in my life and I’m not going to start now.”
    “Thought you’d have gone chip-and-pin.” I dig out my wallet, hand over the cash, take the bag.
    “Chip-and-pin’s fuckin’ insecure, you didn’t hear about that? And the people I deal with — present company excepted — I’m sure they’d find some way to fuck me over.” Greg slips the cash under the CD case so he can get a good look at it as he goes down on the next line. “Anything else I can do you for?”
    “Nah, I’ll let you have the rest of your night.”
    He nods, then asks, “You’re alright, though?”
    “I’ll be good.”
    But as I leave Greg’s flat, hand in my jacket pocket, fingers in a tight claw around the pill bag, I reconsider.
    And reckon I’m pretty fucking far from being good.

6
    Air from outside has wafted the puke smell all through the flat, but these pills need transferred sharpish. Greg might have been taking the piss with the whole “medical condition” thing, but I’m the one still on the codeine so for all intents and purposes it is a medical condition.
    Technically.
    It’s not my fault my GP’s a vindictive prick and he can’t get his head round one stolen prescription. Never darken my doors again, be fucked. It was desperate measures and, Christ, it’s not like I’m popping them like sweets. I only take what I’m supposed to take. I might up the dosage in proportion to the pain, but it’s not like I’ve graduated to heavy-duty opiates or anything.
    I could’ve taken the harder stuff. Easily. Before I hooked up with Greg, there were a couple of seriously bad nights, thought I was well on the way to shaking hands with St Peter. But edging into methadone territory, that’s a line I’m not willing to cross. As soon as my back gets better, as soon as it stops crippling me, I’ll kick the pills into touch. Methadone — that’s another beast entirely, and I know how hard it is to pin the fucker. My brother’ll tell me all the gory details of his long, slow trek to recovery in between the protracted silences of his monthly catch-up call.
    Which reminds me, there should be one of those due soon. There’s something to actively avoid. Not that I don’t like my brother, I just don’t like feeling I have to talk to him. And he’s on a forgiveness kick at the moment, must be one of the steps they taught him when they were urging him to kick the habit. He keeps telling me to come up to Edinburgh, the pair of us can go over to Shotts to talk to my dad.
    Spend quality time in prison with my father, and not just any prison but fucking Shotts? That place is home to Scotland’s nastiest: the coat-hanger pimps, the paedos, the killers, the serial rapists. Whatever my dad did to deserve a cell there, I don’t want to go through it with him. Mind you, knowing him, the bastard probably requested Shotts. He wouldn’t be seen dead in an Edinburgh nick.
    So somehow I don’t see that happening, but Declan can’t understand why I wouldn’t want to go into the type of place that used to give me nightmares to see a guy who did the same.
    Declan left home earlier than me. He doesn’t know how bad it got after he was gone.
    So, fuck forgiveness and healing old wounds, whatever the fuck he has to do as part of the rehab he’s doing.
    Last month, he said, “How’s your back these days?”
    “Fine,” I told him.
    “Still on the painkillers?”
    “They’re still being prescribed.”
    “Right.”
    And I told him right then: “Settle down, Dec. Not everyone in this family has to have a fuckin’ addiction.”
    He didn’t say much after that.
    One day at a time. That’s the mantra. Except right now it’s one pill at a time, because I can’t trust myself with more than one, not with my hands shaking this much. My knee twitches as I pick pills.
    One of them slips out of my fingers. I