Marcus Robinson sat on the green-and-white couch and told Ray Ray about the cop named Donnie Quin.
Three miles away, Donnie woke up in his own bed, a hundred heartbeats from full cardiac arrest.
Donnie tried to open his eyes, but they were swollen shut. He struggled to a mirror and pried them open with his fingers. The face that stared back at him was prickly with heat, lungs whistling with fluid every time he took a breath. Donnie didn’t know exactly what was wrong with him, but Nyquil wasn’t doing the fucking trick.
He felt his legs jelly and grabbed for a corner of the dresser. The soon-to-be-dead cop thought wildly about all the things he should have done in his life. Not for other people. For himself. Like take care of his heart. With fifty beats left, the thing began to jitter and skip. Donnie went to the whip, his reflection in the mirror pumping his chest to get everything back into rhythm.
Twenty-five beats left. Donnie lurched across the room and spent five of them dialing 911. He croaked out his name and crashed to the floor.
Ten left. Donnie could hear the operator by his ear, asking for more information. Donnie rolled onto his back and stared up at shapes moving across the ceiling. Was someone in his bedroom? Did it fucking matter? His heart was coughing now, pumping blood in fits and starts. Donnie counted down the last five beats himself. Then he ducked his head underwater and swam until his chest exploded.
Patient Zero, as Donnie Quin would later be dubbed, was dead before the EMTs wheeled him out of his apartment. Because he was a cop, however, they took him to Cook County Hospital, en route to joining his two homeless pals at the morgue. A sharp intern took one look at Donnie and ordered additional blood work. An hour later, the lab results came back. The intern didn’t know what he was looking at, but knew he didn’t like it. He sent the results to his boss, who ignored them when he got caught up in a conference call with Blue Cross about a new regimen of mammogram testing they were kicking back as unnecessary.
Meanwhile, a couple of doctors at Mount Sinai, one at Mercy, and two at Rush were seeing similar problems with patients. They passed their concerns along to their respective bosses, who also did nothing. At least not right that minute. And the predator that was feeding on Chicago was definitely a “right that minute” sort of thing.