Ring-a-ling! It's the glorious Pavlov-dog effect of the ice cream man. Write about your ice cream man experiences.
The Ice Cream Man
"Hi!" Reeves said for the seven million and thirty-eighth time that summer afternoon. He stuck the photograph in the woman's freckled face, and then showed it to her children. "Anybody know him?" he asked.
"No, officer," said the woman. "Why? Is he... missing?"
Reeves winced, and glanced down at the children.
"Not anymore," he said.
Now she looked at her children, and pulled them closer to her.
"Have they caught...?"
"Not yet," Reeves told her, "but soon."
She hustled the children away, and Reeves moved on to the next soccer mom retrieving her children from Ballard Elementary School. She didn't know Ricky Rasmussen either. For a kid who had attended this school, he had apparently managed to meet very few of his classmates.
The next batch of children rushed past Reeves before he could speak. He heard the familiar ring-a-ding sound, and turned to find an ice cream truck parking at the side of the road. What kind of parent let their child buy ice cream from a stranger when a little boy at the same school had been kidnapped and brutally murdered?
Two women pushed by Reeves as well, intent on the children. Okay, so maybe they knew what they were doing. Still, Reeves didn't understand the department letting the guy operate in this area. It was a recipe for misunderstanding and confrontation.
Reeves waited until all the customers had been served, and showed the grandfatherly ice cream man the picture. He shook his head, like everyone else. Reeves went back to the parade of students and parents down the sidewalk, until he heard the truck making a strange noise, not continually like something mechanically wrong, but intermittently, like someone stomping around, or banging.
"Oh my God! Where's Alice?"
Reeves was with the distraught man immediately.
"Alice?" he asked.
"My stepdaughter. She's nine. She's about so tall and skinny and really dark, and she has her hair in cornrows and she's wearing a green tank and shorts and white sneakers with green pompoms!"
"Okay, I'm calling it in."
As Reeves thumbed his radio, he saw the ice cream truck turn a corner, and noticed for the first time something hanging out of one of the aluminum side panels that he had assumed covered refrigeration machinery. The something looked very much like a green pompom hanging from a shoelace.
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