Aztlan: The Courts of Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page A

on my way back to Aztlan from Xochipilli’s estate, he said he’d meet with me any time, anywhere, as long as our conversation helped bring Coyotl back to the Eagles a little sooner. He sounded worried.
    Then again, Oxhoco took a percentage of Coyotl’s earnings. If Coyotl wasn’t playing, there were no earnings. And with Coyotl’s contract expiring at the end of the season, an even bigger payday was in jeopardy.
    So I wasn’t surprised that Oxhoco was worried. If I’d had beans riding on Coyotl, I would have been worried too.
    Like all agents, regardless of whether they represented the most highly paid ball court players or Mirror writers or jewelry designers, Oxhoco had an office in the Merchant City.
    I told him that I would meet him in half an hour. Of course, it would have been more convenient for me to see him in my own office at the City Interrogation Center. But if I had learned anything in my cycles as an Investigator, it was that people were more forthcoming when they were questioned in familiar surroundings—and I needed Oxhoco to be forthcoming.
    I had barely hung up with him when I got a call on my radio. It was Pactonal.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    He sounded like he wanted to tell me something, but all I heard was a long, drawn-out yawn.
    “Up late?” I said.
    “Sorry, I couldn’t sleep. Not after that beating we took from Yopitzinco. All I could think about was Coyotl and how much we could have used him in the corridor.”
    I doubted that he was the only one who had lost sleep over that match. Aztlan had a lot of fans.
    “Did you think of something?” I asked.
    “Not yet,” he said. “But I’ll be wracking my brain, that’s for sure.”
    Great, I thought.
    While I had him on the line, I took a shot: “Tell me, did Coyotl ever give you the impression he didn’t want to play a game?”
    Pactonal laughed. “That guy wanted to play even when there wasn’t a game. He wanted to play in his sleep .”
    Just then, I heard a female voice in the background. I couldn’t make out exactly what she was saying, but I got the general idea. Apparently, Coyotl’s disappearance wasn’t the only reason Pactonal had stayed up late.
    “Got to go,” he said. “Speak to you later.”
    “No doubt,” I replied—though, truthfully, I wasn’t looking forward to it. When I’d asked him to buzz me, it was in the hope that he would actually have something to say.
    Then something occurred to me. Coyotl’s current teammates hadn’t known a lot about him. But his previous teammates, guys who knew him when he first came up . . .
    I put in a call to one of them—a guy named Nagual who had played long enough to have been on my teams before he was on Coyotl’s. Unfortunately, I got no response. I left a message asking him to get back to me as soon as possible.
     
    As the Merchant City was enclosed on three sides by roadless hills, my driver had to cut back into Aztlan into order to get to Oxhoco’s place. In the auto-carriage as much as by rail, entering the Merchant City was like crossing over into a different world.
    The careful, ordered symmetry of broad streets, soaring pyramids, and splendid reflecting pools of Aztlan proper suddenly gave way to a frenzy of chaos and color. Where Aztlan was majestic, dignified, the Merchant City was a hive—each fat, bristling bee striving eagerly to crawl over all the others for the chance to suck up a little more nectar.
    I had never met Oxhoco before but I had heard a lot about him. After all, he represented not only Coyotl but a half-dozen other ball court players. From what I had heard, none of them were unhappy with his negotiations on their behalf.
    He turned out to be short and squat, with a couple of chins too many. A toad of a man. But a toad who liked expensive things, if the dramatic array of furnishings in his office was any indication.
    “What can I do to help?” he asked after we had sat down on matching ocelot-skin chairs under a painting of a sunset