Page 114 of King’s Ransom

At another location half a mile to the north—unseen by me, unknown to me—an alarm was triggered by my opening of the door.

Someone turned at the alarm and frowned.

I entered the mill with Heidi. Georgy lingered at the door.

The mill’s earthen floor was littered with the usual trash one finds in isolated places: the detritus of teenagers.

Beer bottles, soda cans, empty chip packets and, of course, cigarette butts and marijuana joints.

As Georgy waited just inside the doorway—anxiously keeping watch for headless horsemen—for the next few minutes, Heidi and I examined the floor, playing our iPhones’ flashlights over it in a grid format, searching.

And I saw it.

A glint of light in the dirt.

A reflection off something.

Something silver.

‘Heidi, over here,’ I said.

We hurried to the source of the glint and crouched over it.

It was a piece of peeled-back silver foil, half-buried in the dirt.

I picked it up, turned it over in my fingers.

Printed on it were the words:

NARCAN (naloxone HCl)

NASAL SPRAY 4 mg

‘Narcan,’ Heidi said.

‘The commercial name for naloxone,’ I said. ‘Okay. This is progress.’

And it was.

It confirmed that the Grandmaster and his two goons had been kept here . . . drugged with Duramorph . . . and then awoken with Narcan.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’

Georgy seemed relieved at that and practically bolted out.

Heidi and I emerged from the old mill to see Georgy hurrying into the cluster of pines that led back to the cemetery. Still gripping her little pistol, Heidi strode off after him and disappeared among the trees.

I stopped as I came to the line of pines and turned, scanning the area around the ruined mill one last time—

—and I started in shock.

A dark figure stood on the other side of the stream.

A man.

Standing dead still behind a waist-high snow mound.

He stood so utterly still that at first I thought he was a statue.