Lou groaned. He knew this was going to be a media circus, and he wondered how long it was going to take before the mayor got involved.

First Will McKinley was unlucky—twice, in fact—and then he got lucky twice. Will was unlucky to have been involved in the Rothman case to begin with—to be found on the street with Pia and mistaken for George, resulting in his being dealt with as an annoying tagalong who knew too much. Will was also unlucky that Neri Krasnigi’s gun had fired at all. When Neri had cleaned and loaded his gun earlier that day, he hadn’t been as careful as he thought. A few sizable pieces of grit had been stuck to the first bullet he loaded and lodged inside the chamber. Under different circumstances, or if the pieces of grit had been just slightly bigger, perhaps the gun would have blown up in Neri’s face rather than misfiring slightly and dispatching the bullet at perhaps fifty percent of usual velocity. That was lucky.

Will was lucky again, if someone shot in the head can be said to be lucky. Will had turned his head so that he was hit in the temple, not the forehead, meaning the bullet made a complete transit through his frontal lobe, a kind of injury that had seen miraculous recoveries in the past. It might also be considered fortuitous that he’d been shot a hundred yards from a major trauma center, where expert help was immediately available. A superb team of doctors had treated Will within minutes of his being shot and continued to monitor him closely. He was now in a medically induced coma, hooked up to an array of monitors and life-giving machinery. Everyone was hoping Will’s luck would not run out.

Chapter 55.

55.

GREEN POND, NEW JERSEY
MARCH 25, 2011, 8:45 P.M.

Prek drove carefully into Green Pond, a private summer lake community in Morris County in northern New Jersey. What could have been an hour’s drive had taken nearly two, partly because of traffic, partly because Prek kept the van well under the speed limit, even on the open stretches of road. Some of the items in the van would have taken a lot of explaining if the vehicle was involved in a traffic stop.