Chapter 30

By the time I got back to Elvis’s room, he was almost back to normal, satting 95 percent on room air, after just the Ventolin, Atrovent, and Solumedrol. Tucker had held off on the Epi and Magnesium.

So maybe this was just an asthma attack instead of anaphylaxis again. Maybe.

Archer was talking to the police who’d arrived, giving them all the details about Lucia and Hugo, but he could be here any minute, ready to beat up Elvis. So I asked the Escape King point blank, “Did you sleep with Lucia today?”

He blinked at me. “What? No way.” But then his eyes drifted off to the left, and his breath seemed to tighten for a second.

Tucker grabbed my arm. “He never had a chance. I’ve been with him since 9 a.m., and Archer must’ve been before that. I didn’t even see Lucia until just now.”

“Any other girls?” I asked Elvis. “Is that what you do before a show? A good luck thing? You’re going to die anyway, might as well get off beforehand?”

Elvis waved me away. He sat up on the edge of the bed, gazing at the wall instead of my face.

“Lucia admitted that she gave you oral sex before the first show. Hugo took a video of it. So there’s no point in denying it. I just thought you might want to know that you’re probably allergic to latex. So when you put that latex condom on, you sabotaged your own stunt. Anaphylaxis makes you itchy. Makes you feel like your throat is swelling and closing up. Makes you short of breath and wheezy. Sometimes people puke or have diarrhea. But the real problem is that you can’t breathe anymore. So if you’re having an anaphylactic reaction, and you’re chained in a coffin and thrown underwater, you May. Well. Die.”

Elvis opened his mouth to answer, but his blood pressure monitor cuff buzzed, starting to fill up with air. He turned, stared at the cuff, and ripped it off his arm. “Get this shit off me.”

“No. That’s your blood pressure cuff. Don’t—”

He ripped the Velcro apart so the cuff fell on the bed. He seized the O2 sat monitor, a white plastic clip on his finger, and launched it as far as it would go. It got tangled up in his sheets, but he was already tearing the cardiac monitor clips off his chest, setting off a beeping frenzy of alarms and flatlines on the monitor.

“It’s okay, man!” said Tucker, grabbing his arm and casting me a back off look. “Listen, don’t worry about that now. Hope’s just—”

Elvis shook him off and balanced on his feet beside the bed. You could see his athletic strength and poise, just in the grace and curve of his spine. He said to me, in a low voice, “I really don’t fucking remember that day. I would remember that. But I know someone was out to get me. Archer told me after, the chains weren’t right, and they didn’t find no lock picks on my sleeves or in the coffin afterward. Someone stole them. I always keep them on my sleeves.”

“But not that day,” said Archer, from the doorway.

We turned to look at him. He looked pale around the lips, but he kept talking to Elvis in a steady voice, walking toward us, ignoring me, ignoring Tucker, and ignoring the police who’d now joined us in the room. “For that stunt, you were wearing a striped wetsuit with white cuffs. You were afraid someone might spot the lock picks on the sleeves, so you moved them to the neckline, where you could blend them in with the black stripes. Don’t you remember?”

“No,” said Elvis. The word reverberated in the room for a long moment, but then his face crumpled, and he said, “Oh, shit. Those stripes.”

He started to cry. Archer carefully put his arms around his brother, keeping his body at a distance, but shielding his face from the rest of us. Protecting him. Like he always did.