The Picture Ranch 63

The truck I had driven up earlier was nowhere to be seen. I wondered where the joy powder was.

Moose piped up, ‘Lady says somethin’ about last door on the right, in the corner of the yard.’

Caruso’s head flopped like her neck was broken, she didn’t seem like she could say anything about anything. We left the bodies in the dust and trailed over to the door. It looked new. It was made of some kind of metal, but it wasn’t locked. I went in first. There was no-one home. It looked like Lugosi, Karloff and Rathbone had just stepped out for a drink or two, during a break in shooting Son of Frankenstein.

‘Just think of it as a clinic for horses.’ Miss G said, on entering the room.

It was L-shaped, taking up much more than just the corner of the building that comprised three sides of the ranch. It was big enough for two horse stalls. Outsized surgical instruments were on one wall, on a tool-board like a tidy mechanic’s. Naturally, there wasn’t a table for patients. If a horse couldn’t stand up, it generally got put down, out on the straw-covered floor of a stall in the stable itself. Moose tried to get his ear closer to the Caruso dame’s head, like some kind of horse whisperer.

‘Just put her on the floor of one of those stalls.’ I said.

‘Sit her down, put her back against the wall.’ Miss G chipped in.

Moose complied, stuck his head out of the stall and said,

‘We need dope and bandages.. I’m gonna try and set it.’

‘She’ll probably die of shock,’ Miss G’s voice was flat. I couldn’t tell if she was bothered either way.

Moose growled, ‘She ain’t done it yet. Reckon she’s tough.’

I didn’t point out that she had shot us full of dope and had been driving us out into the big nowhere most likely to off us both and leave the bodies for the coyotes and vultures.

There were ice-boxes against one wall. They weren’t the latest thing, but they were as tall as me. I wondered what the hell a horse-doctor would need to keep in them. So I looked. That solved the puzzle of the powder, since the fifty 1lb bags were filling the one on the right. The one on the left held nothing but what looked like a pail of horse’s piss and a Hershey bar. There was no wrapper. I shut the ice-box door pretty quick. There was no sign of whatever had been used to K.O. Moose and me. The syringe was still in the truck out in the desert, I had no plans to go back and get it. 

Miss G was looking through equally tall cupboards for some kind of bandage. She told me to take a bag of cocaine into Moose. I wondered how she even knew about the powder, but Caruso was already screaming the house down. By the time I got there. Moose had used a knife to cut away Caruso’s blouse. There was a lump in her skin. The collarbone was out of place, maybe not broken, after all. I showed him the powder.

‘Ain’t that gonna hop her up?’

‘I’m goin’ to rub it on the skin. It numbs things. Only reason the gang guys rub it on their gums. Numb gum means it’s the good stuff, not The Bar Keeper’s Friend. You hold her still, while I rub it on.’

Moose ripped open the bag and spilled God knew how many dollars-worth on the stall floor. The next horse in the stall would sniff the straw and jump the moon.