Resurrection Man Read Online Free

Darkie said, keeping his eyes on the television. She felt him shift his grip and remained still. ‘This fucking Victor Kelly character has that lot downstairs in fucking palpitations. Take your blouse off.’
    ‘Make me. Who’s Victor Kelly?’
    ‘This character hangs round the Pot Luck with Big Ivan Crommie and Willie Lambe. Thinks he’s God’s gift to the movement. Word is his da’s a Catholic. Thinks he’s some kind of hard man. Shooting the mouth off about how the only way to do someone is with a knife, for fuck’s sake. Take it off or I’ll rip it.’
    ‘Take her easy, Darkie, it’s only new. So what’s the citizens’ army so worried about?’
    ‘Don’t be so fucking sarcastic. They’re all scared out of their shite of him for some reason. My fucking granny’s ninety, has palpitations if she wins ten bob at the bingo. This lot’s supposed to be a unit. Defenders of the faith and all. Are you going asleep on me or what?’
    ‘What’s your big mad rush anyhow?’
    ‘Supposed to be a council meeting at six. Look very professional, so it would, them walking in and me sticking it in for God and for Ulster. Look at them bastard politicians on the TV – us down here doing their dirty work for them.’
    ‘If you’re going to do it, do it right. It’s not a fire you’re poking.’
    ‘Say it was him that cut this poor fucking Taig to pieces with this knife. Boy they found on Berlin Street.’
    ‘Who did – put your hand there.’
    ‘Victor Kelly, I told you. My granny …’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I says my granny …’
    ‘Fuck your granny.’
    *
    She liked Darkie. He was sensitive to the pain his organization inflicted. He watched funerals on the news, commented on the age of the children following the cortège. He had a sense of obligation. He was committed to a wider vocabulary of death which included widows and children. She liked his inattention, his slim brown cock, his seriousness.
    *
    She left him in the office and went downstairs where she ordered a Bacardi at the bar. There was still sunlight coming through the windows and the sandbagged doorway. Late afternoon . The sound of traffic. City centre office workers dispersingto their homes on the outskirts with the radio turned up high for news of diversions, checkpoints in the radial suburbs.
    The barman had to say her name several times before she took her change. It was a quality in her that women disliked. A lack of focus. A physical memory dwelt on.
    There were four or five men in the corner of the bar talking about guns.
    ‘I could get you this Lee-Enfield. Perfect nick. Come across in the Claudia .’ The Claudia .The turn of the century arms smuggler, a potent name riding in the offshore currents of an empire’s memory. Source of arms, blockade runner, succourer of outposts.
    ‘Lee-Enfield my arse. Tell us this, how do you hide a rifle in a fucking crowd? The pistol’s your only man. The revolver. Smith and Wesson.’
    ‘Browning.’
    ‘Fucking Magnum.’
    One of the men detached himself from the group, joined his hands and arched his back. The others stopped talking and watched. He straddled an imaginary victim lying on the ground.
    ‘This way you see into his eyes.’
    He lowered his joined hands until they were within a foot of the ground and moved as if from recoil.
    ‘Keep looking in the eyes. Boom. Fucking brains out.’ The man lifted the front of his shirt and mimed pushing a weapon into his waistband, then stepped back to the bar and lifted his drink.
    ‘That’s fucking all right close up. What happens you want to plug the bastard from the roof. Out a window?’
    ‘That takes your SLR, your Armalite, your Kalashnikov.’
    ‘Not the fucking Lee-Enfield’s been sitting in your ma’s attic this past fifty years getting blocked up with mouseshit.’
    They were appreciative of the mechanisms of death. Some of them were ex-soldiers and had travelled to places such as Cyprus, Belize. Their sentences had a dusty, travelled