The words jolted me. Cowboy was my old combat call sign from when I ran with the Department of Military Sciences. But the voice I heard, speaking to me there in that cell, did not belong to one of my former SpecOps colleagues. No. Nor was the use of the nickname related to my job. This was the voice of the person who’d hung that name on me a long, long time ago. A voice that could not be here. Not now, not ever.

“Go away,” I said.

“Screw that,” said the voice. “Get your sorry butt up, or I’m telling Mom.”

No, no, no, my mind growled.

Aloud, I said, “You can’t be here, Sean. You can’t.”

There was the scuff of a foot and then the creak of mattress coils as someone sat down on the bed. It took so much of everything I had left to open my eyes. To turn. To see my brother sitting there.

He looked the way he had when we were kids. He was wiry and had the look of combined exasperation and humor he wore whenever I did something dangerous or stupid. Or both. Like when I tried to base jump from a tree using a parachute made from black plastic trash bags. Or when I tried for a somersault into the pool at school. He had skeptical eyes and a scuffle of sandy hair, and a scar on his jaw from when he’d run halfway through a privet hedge while we were playing Frisbee in the front yard.

Sean.

My only brother.

Blown to red rags on Christmas Eve. Bones in a box and laid to rest between our father and Sean’s wife and kids.

“No,” I said. “You’re not here.”

He shrugged. “You say that, dingus, but you’re actually talking to me.”

“No, I’m not,” I said.

“Whatever, dude. You’re just being weird.”

“And you’re a ghost.”

Sean cocked his head to one side. “I don’t know … am I?”

“Or am I crazy?” I asked.

He spread his hands in an if the shoe fits gesture. Then he tilted his face up as sunlight fell on him. There was no sunlight anywhere, there couldn’t be. Just on him. I watched his shoulders rise and fall as he took a long breath and sighed it out. Without looking at me, he said, “He’s coming for you.”

“Who?” I asked. “Santoro? Let that motherfucker come. I want him to.”

Sean turned to look at me, and in the fragment of a second it took his head to turn, he changed. Now he was the Sean I’d only glimpsed on that awful day. Older. Thirty, with the eyes of a cop whose heart had not yet been thoroughly broken by the job. Wearing an ugly Christmas sweater, with a smudge of green cookie icing on his cheek from where a child might have kissed him.