Chapter 5

“He’s got four minutes to survive,” Archer reminded us. “Only four minutes before he runs out of oxygen.”

The bikini girl held up four fingers. At least she could count.

The spooky Twilight Zone theme started up.

Tucker called, “Hope, could you hold the camera? I gotta grab my spare battery. Keep filming, okay?”

“No problem.” I took the camera in my hands while he kept it more or less steady. I tried to overlap my right thumb with his over the record button, and pushed down firmly when Tucker let go, but of course, it stopped recording. The camera screen blinked, showing an icon of a battery red-lining, and turned itself off.

Tucker swore. I held on to the camera while he yanked a black case out of his backpack.

The McGill girls chattered away. “He’s gonna get out any second.”

“No, he’s not! He’s gotta make it last, make us sweat.”

“If I were him, I’d bust out of there right away! I can’t stand elevators, even. Can you imagine a coffin?”

We watched on-screen, but the surface of the river appeared undisturbed. Archer said, “Elvis lives, live in Montreal, in honour of the one, the great, the only Mr. Harry Houdini.”

We clapped. Some people whistled.

“El-vis! El-vis!”

The clock in the corner had changed over from a countdown to a timer of how long Elvis had been underwater. So far, it had only been a minute and 47 forty-seven seconds.

More weird music filled the air with uneasy, dissonant sounds.

Tucker grabbed the camera back and fumbled inside the plastic rain covering, Uh oh. I wanted Elvis to break out, but not before Tucker captured it on film.

I watched the screen. No sign of Elvis.

“This music is whacked.”

“I think it’s ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’”

“I thought that was noo-nu-noo-nu, noo-nu-noo-nu.”

“No, dummy, that’s the Twilight Zone. They just played it.”

I heard a click, and Tucker turned his camera back on. “Yes!” And he was filming again.

Okay. Now Elvis could break out.

Only he wasn’t.

“Two minutes,” said the announcer. “We’re at the halfway mark. Will he make it? They say the Mounties always get their man. Elvis, too, has a perfect record. He has escaped fire. He has dodged a car crusher with seconds to spare. He has gone skydiving and opened his parachute only sixty seconds before smashing to the ground. But can he escape the death force of Mother Nature at her worst, the cold and treacherous waters of the St. Lawrence River, on the anniversary of his master’s death?”

I stood on my toes, trying to peek at any evidence of activity in the coffin below the water’s surface. I hadn’t realized I’d moved too close until another woman elbowed me back from the fence.

Two minutes and 42 seconds.

“I don’t like this,” I muttered, even though Tucker was too busy filming to pay attention to me.

To my surprise, Tucker answered, even though he never took his eyes away from his camera screen. “This is getting long,” he admitted, “but it’s part of Elvis’s showmanship. When he escaped the car crusher, it was only seconds away from crushing him.”

I didn’t want to think about the car crusher. I was trying not to chew on my lower lip, which was already cracked and dry.

Three minutes.

Archer cleared his throat. “Come on, Elvis. You can do it. Let’s give him some encouragement, people!”

We yelled and stomped our feet.

I was watching Archer. He kept checking the clock and the monitor, his eyes darting back and forth, showing the whites a little more than usual. He’d started pacing before he forced himself to stop and smile at the audience.

I’d heard that Harry Houdini would escape underwater and cling to the underside of a dock until people thought for sure he’d drowned. But Archer didn’t strike me as that great an actor, and he looked worried.

Had they somehow rigged up a two-way microphone? That way, Archer would be able to hear Elvis in the coffin even as Archer called out to the crowd. “Elvis. Calling Elvis. Paging Elvis, the Escape Master, the Man of Mystery. We need you now. We need you here, Elvis. Don’t leave us.”

Three minutes and eleven seconds.

Horns blared out of the speakers, followed by some weird tweets. I was seriously hating the music. Or maybe it was just my own uneasiness.

“Bring back Elvis!” a man shouted. A few people whistled and cheered. I wasn’t sure if he meant Elvis Serratore or Presley or both, but I clapped my approval. If he only had four minutes to get out, and he still had to break the coffin, it hardly left any seconds to spare.

Still no sign of wood breaking up, or a hand emerging from the water.

Archer turned away from the crowd. I thought for sure he was talking into a microphone this time.

The bikini girl stood frozen with her hands together, not posing, for once.

The crane started lifting the coffin out of the water, but its pace seemed agonizingly slow. The coffin had tilted toward the foot side and water was sluicing out of the small gaps between the coffin boards, but the coffin was still intact.

Elvis was still trapped inside the coffin filled with river water.

At three minutes and 28 seconds.

A few women screamed.

An ambulance siren broke through the air, and then the bilious yellow ambulance itself sped down the quay, lights flashing, following the same path as the Elvis Escapes truck not long before.

“Oh, my God! It’s real. I thought it was just fake.”

“It could still be fake.”

“Why would you fake fucking it up?”

“Stand back. Make room!” called Archer, and the bikini girl waved us back from the fence, her eyes wide and frantic.

“I’m a doctor!” I shouted at her. While she turned to check with Archer, I ripped open the gate and sailed through, not waiting to see if Tucker was behind me.

Police had materialized as well, but I repeated, “I’m a doctor!” and after a second, they let me through, while at least two of them advanced toward the crowd to force them back in through the open gate and lock it.

“Move it!” a cop snapped at a cameraman who was trying to zoom in.

Archer and the burly crane guy were prying open the lid with hammers and crowbars. Archer split the lid on the top, but the crane guy popped the bottom half open and Archer joined in to pop the coffin lid off completely.

Elvis was lying on his back in the coffin still three quarters full of water. Dimly, I noticed he’d gotten the chains and one glove off, but he lay very still while Archer ripped the mask off his face.

Elvis’s face was deathly white. As in, dead white, except for a few red blotches on his face and neck. And his lips had turned that purply blue.

His chest did not rise and fall.

The paramedics jumped out of the ambulance with an oxygen tank and mask.

I repositioned Elvis’s head into the sniffing position, to maximize his airway. I reached for his carotid pulse out of habit, barely letting it graze for two seconds, even though the new guidelines are that we shouldn’t check for a pulse in the field.

Then I dropped my hand, fell to my knees, braced my arms, placed my linked hands on his sternum, and started CPR for all I was worth. His chest was cold and my hands wanted to slip off his wetsuit, and I was making waves in the coffin water as Elvis’s body buckled with the compressions.

“I’m starting CPR!” I bellowed at Tucker, who suddenly loomed above me.

Tucker dropped to his knees and placed his hand on Elvis’s neck. “Good pulsations!”

I nodded, but I couldn’t talk because it was taking all of my energy to do the CPR. Indenting a grown man’s chest is hard work even when you’re not grinding your knees into the concrete in front of a coffin. I was starting to sweat and gasp.

“You want me to take over?” asked Tucker.

I nodded and Tucker dove in there, hands-first, elbows already locked for compression. He indented Elvis’s chest harder than I did, and I moved around the other side of the coffin to check the pulse, just as the paramedics fitted a 100 percent oxygen mask on Elvis’s face.

The stocky female paramedic secured the oxygen mask and pushed air into his lungs, noting, “He’s tight,” so Elvis’s lungs were stiff and hard to bag. The taller male paramedic took over compressions. A third rolled a collapsible stretcher into place.

“Move, move, move! C’est assez!” a police officer yelled at one of the news crews.

“We need to get him out of the water. I think he’s hypothermic,” I shouted at Tucker. He nodded.

Two paramedics grabbed the head and feet to lift Elvis while Tucker took the midsection. The third paramedic barely stopped compressions for the seconds it took to load Elvis into the stretcher and jack it up to full height.

Elvis’s damp body immediately soaked the stretcher linens, but at least now he was out of the river water.

I checked his right carotid pulse. Something thrummed against my fingertips in a quick but faint rhythm.

“We’ve got a pulse! I think,” I added, more quietly, and dropped my hand so that Tucker could have a feel on his side. If you press both sides of the neck at the same time, it stimulates the vagal nerve and you can drop a person’s heart rate—the opposite of what we wanted here.

The paramedics had already started to run toward the ambulance, bumping Elvis in his stretcher, so I sprinted alongside them. Tucker didn’t dare take Elvis’s pulse while they ran, but I could already hear the news people behind us reporting to the cameras, “This just in. He has a pulse. Repeat, he has a pulse.”

Oh, crap. Sometimes, you end up feeling your own pulse during the resuscitation, because your heart is beating so fast. While the paramedics loaded Elvis in the ambulance, I prayed that the oxygen (and his heart) truly were kicking in.

I pulled alongside the stretcher. Elvis’s eyes fluttered. For a second, I wasn’t sure if I was just seeing things, but then it happened again, and I heard Tucker suck in his breath.