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my usual efforts to differentiate the normal from the Grey and just walk.
     
     
    Even with gentrification, Occidental Avenue hadn’t changed much physically since the city finally finished the streets and sidewalks in the early 1900s. During some later civic fit of historic preservation, an open park paved with reclaimed white bricks as big and uneven as giant’s teeth had been added at the north end where there once was a parking lot. The rest of the three-block stretch above the stadium had been restored to its original bricked and cobbled plane to match, so I ran no risk of suddenly stumbling into a Grey gap between the old street level and the new. The most dangerous things were the ice-slicked bricks and the possibility of running into someone—Grey or normal—with bad breath and a chip on their shoulder.
     
     
    It was getting dark between the rows of historic brick-and-stone buildings, and the quaint three-globe iron streetlamps were powering up to cast oblong pools of light onto the cobbles. Even in the gloom I could see the transparent memory-shape of a statue that had stood in the middle of the mall during the 1990s: a life-size bronze cow with a howling coyote perched on its back. Crowds of ghosts moved up and down the mall, mostly men going in and out of the former saloons, box houses, and brothels. Dim signs advertised various services from assaying to while-you-wait tailoring—though there were an awful lot of those for such a sleazy district, and I had to wonder what exactly was being “altered” in these catchpenny shops.
     
     
    I paused by the shadowy cow and watched the ghost of a Klondike-era whore stroll eternally up and down the brick sidewalk. She paid me no attention, nor did most of the other specters: they were no more than recursive whorls of time in the city’s memory of itself.
     
     
    Most ghosts are like that, just memory loops or fragments of time, having no will and no volition. It’s the other kinds—the thinking and acting kinds—that cause trouble. Which brought me back to the problem of the dead guy in the tunnel. There hadn’t been a ghost attending him, no sense of shock, or even a lingering presence of death except in the color of the Grey material that clung to him, and his odor had been a perfectly mortal stench, not magical corruption. I’m no necromancer, so I can’t pick up information about someone’s death from the atmosphere or objects. If they’ve died violently where I’m standing, I may feel shock and pain, but unless there’s a repeating time loop, I can’t get more than that—I don’t know anything. But there’d been nothing to know as well as nothing to feel. It was as if the man had died elsewhere and been carried to the tunnel, or had somehow simply ceased to exist without any shock of death at all and left his body behind, missing one leg. It was confusing and I didn’t like it.
     
     
    Maybe it had been his leg found in the construction pit near the football stadium, I mused. That site was just a few blocks south of where I stood near the former bronze cow. But the leg had been found weeks ago and the body hadn’t shown signs of decomposition that I’d noticed—he’d looked like he had been dead a day at most. It was cold now, but it had been warmer and wetter when the leg was found. If it was his leg, there should have been rot whether he’d been dead or alive when he lost it. If the leg wasn’t his, where was his own? And who or what had made that hole in the side of the tunnel?
     
     
    I wandered forward, toward the park and my office building beyond it, thinking more than observing. Had he just frozen to death? When was the leg removed? Who was he and how did Quinton come to know him?
     
     
    Movement among the shadows drew my attention back to the street. I’d come to the Main Street intersection without noticing. The open space of the park with its two avenues of plane trees lay just across the brickwork road. Clusters of men