He said, “Who hired you?”
The man’s reply was another moan.
“If you won’t talk,” Kerrigan said, “you’ll stay there under the box.”
He stood up. He turned away from the moans of the crushed man. Facing the opened doorway of the loading platform, he listened to the sound of the rainstorm. It seemed to merge with the noise of a cyclone that whirled through his brain.
Just then he heard the man saying, “It was a woman.”
And after that it seemed there was no sound at all. Just a frozen stillness. Again he turned very slowly, and he was looking down at the man.
“A woman,” the man said. He moaned once more, and coughed a few times. He wheezed, “She lives on Vernon Street. I think they call her Bella.”
“Bella.” He said it aloud to himself. Then he reached down and lifted the heavy box off the chest of the man. He heard the man’s sigh of relief, the dragging sound of air pulled into tortured lungs.
The man rolled over on his side. He tried to get to his feet. He made it to his knees, shook his head slowly, and muttered, “This ain’t no good. I’m in bad shape. You might as well call the Heat. At least they’ll take me to a hospital.”
“You don’t need a hospital,” Kerrigan said. He put his hands under the man’s armpits, then used his arms as a hook to raise him from the floor.