At that moment, another team of MedíCarro attendants burst into the room. The Texcoco team doctors shouted at them to take away the other player, that the injured Jaguar was already beyond help. In the resulting commotion, I bent down to pick up the organ-transfer case, thinking to slip out of the room. But then I realized what had just happened. The Jaguars had won the national finals. The man who lay on the stretcher in front of me was the team captain whose head the cultists—and Vargas—wanted to place in the itzompan at dawn. Did it matter that he had died at the stadium, instead of being sacrificed at the site itself?