Making his way to the bar wasn’t easy. He eased through to the far end and there, head ducked low, was Neil Browne. He edged his eyes up carefully and saw Dan, now trying to make his way down the bar.

The man leaped up and headed for the kitchen.

It was then that Dan saw Katie. She had come in. She apparently knew people in the bar; they were calling out to her, and she was waving and smiling but moving.

Toward the kitchen. Katie must have also caught sight of Browne. He couldn’t see exactly where the man had gone.

“Excuse me, excuse me...excuse me,” he said, trying to press through the crowd.

“Hey, buddy, wait your turn!” one man shouted at him.

He was desperate. “FBI!” he shouted with authority. Well, he was working for the FBI.

And it looked like Katie and a killer were heading for the same place. He had to get to her.

Why hadn’t she stayed in the restaurant?

Because, he knew, whoever else might be involved in this whole thing, she was after the man who had killed her parents.

Dan burst through the swinging kitchen doors at last to see that the ostensible Dr. Neil Browne carried a gun for use when he wasn’t wielding an axe.

He had the cooks and bussers and several of the servers lined up on one side of a large, stainless-steel workstation, almost on top of some massive ovens and cooktops. Browne was across from them, his gun leveled at the shaking, crying crowd.

One person wasn’t shaking: it was Katie. She stood out in the dress she was wearing, and because she simply was a beautiful young woman. She also stood out because she was staring at the man with the gun with so much disdain.

“You, get over here!” Neil Browne called to her.

He’d been wearing prosthetics, and they were peeling off him now. The kitchen was hot; he’d been hot running. He looked a bit like a zombie, decaying in the steam that rose from pots on the cooktops.

Dan took aim at the man, but Browne had known he was there. He cocked his gun, still aimed at Katie.

“I’m going to get that girl, G-man,” he told Dan. “You lower your weapon, or she dies first and then as many as I can take down.”

“But you’ll be dead,” Dan said.

The man’s gun didn’t waver but remained directly aimed at Katie as he turned to look at Dan. “I don’t really care. I am a creature of the six. I will go on. She will die along with all the rest of these people.”

“I’m not a G-man. Lower your weapon.”

He could fire...and kill the bastard, here and now, easily.

But the man’s gun was cocked...