Try Our New Strawberry Fudgesicles
I had never had a Strawberry Fudgesicle. Never even thought about the existence of that kind of thing, but as I rolled past that accident at 3am: those were the only words that I could make out on the side of the truck, engulfed in flames.
Originally, my 3am brain wondered what a Strawberry Fudgesicle was, and if it was something that I would ever try. I wasn’t particularly opposed to strawberry flavored things, but would it taste more like chocolate or strawberry? These were questions that required answers, until the sensible me that sits in the passenger’s seat to keep me awake and alert suggested that perhaps the fact that there was an overturned Ice Cream Truck on fire at 3am was more important. I reluctantly agreed and promised myself that I would investigate the melted Ice Cream Truck when I got home. I turned my music back up, because I no longer needed the silence to be able to see what happened on the road behind me and let the cruise control take me home.
***
There I was, 3am, floating along I-85, on my way home from a wedding reception on this Friday night. Me and the three or four other people on the highway this late were all cruising anywhere between 65 and 90 at any given point in time. The cops on the road were either too exhausted to stop anyone going over the mandated 65 or just didn’t care. But I would occasionally pass one who had stopped the sports car who thought they would take advantage of the empty highway to see if their car could actually get into the 100s. In those cases, I was sure it was just jealousy. There’s no point in pulling over a hoopty going 90+, it’d probably break down before it got far. But I digress.
My music was blasting to keep me awake and somewhat alert as the cruise control dragged my car along. My best friend, Kyra, was texting me because she lived in California and never slept anyway. She was asking how the wedding had gone just as I and the other cars floating on cruise control cleared the top of a hill. The phone ding came in almost like the timing in a movie. As soon as I heard it all of the lights came into focus. I turned my music all the way down so I could see better. It was like the worst Christmas you would ever see. The four of us started to merge right immediately. In the distance, the entire emergency brigade had come for the bonfire. Two firetrucks, an ambulance, at least six cop cars, and even the HERO truck was invited. All of them lit up like Christmas. Four of the five lanes were blocked off by cones and cop cars. As we got closer, me and my four new nosey friends, slowed to a crawl. We could see the flames, and bonfire is not an exaggeration. Only one of the cops bothered to try directing us to keep moving but the look on his face said it all.
Whoever was in that marshmallow truck was toasted, or close to it. He was trying to move us out of respect. One of the cars in our four-person procession stopped on the opposite side of the road. Maybe to take pictures, or ask questions, either way, they weren’t going to be any help. I kept moving, but took one last look back, and that’s when I saw it, the giant cone off in the distance, untouched by the flames, just a little crushed. Then the truck, all of the token stickers and signs completely gone, just the pink words “Try Our New Strawberry Fudgsicles” remained unharmed as the fingers of the flames reached for them. I looked away and slowly picked up speed, and for a moment, I could swear that I heard the faint sound of the strained jingle of the truck calling out from behind me.
When I finally made it home—after getting ready for bed—I sat under my covers, laptop on my lap, my pillows propped up behind me. I was determined to find out something about my melted ice cream truck. I opened Google, tried to think of what to plug into the search engine, then promptly fell asleep.
Hours later, I woke to my phone yelling at me. Kyra was calling at what was now noon, my time. I answered it just to stop the ringing.
“Hello,” the crackled word barely made it out of my mouth before I reached for the water bottle I kept on my bedside table.
“So you got kidnapped right?” Her tone had a mixture of irritation and sarcasm.
“What?” I asked.
“That’s why you didn’t tell me you made it home? You must be dead on the side of the road somewhere”.
I laughed, “No. I’m fine. I just forgot. I totally passed out when I got home”.
“Unacceptable,” she said.
“Oh, but speaking of dead on the side of the road—”
“—why would you open a sentence like that?”
“Just wait. I have to tell you what I saw yesterday,” I pressed.
She sighed, “Fine. What is it? But we really need to work on how you go into conversations”.
I giggled. “Anyway…,” I proceeded to recount the complete image of the ice cream truck and the emergency party that I passed on the way home. I told her that I was going to research it when I came home but fell asleep. I tried to connect the fact that I didn’t get any research done to the fact that I didn’t message her either, but she still wasn’t appeased by my excuse.
“So what information did you think would be available on an accident that you saw maybe 30 minutes prior?” she asked.
“Fair. But you know 3am brain doesn’t think about that,” I said.
“And apparently it doesn’t think to tell it’s BEST FRIEND that it hasn’t been kidnapped or murdered on the side of the road or equally crisped”.
“I am genuinely sorry about that. I really did mean to text you.”
“Yeah, I know you did… Have you looked it up since then? There might be something now”.
“I kind of just woke up”.
“When I called you?”
“You know me so well,” I giggled.
“Go make your coffee, Quinn. Call me back after and I’ll help you do research. I have the day off and nothing to do”.
“This is why I love you.”
“Yeah whatever,” She kissed at the phone, and I managed to do the same, so she heard it just before she hung up.
I put my phone on the charger because I realized that I neglected to do so last night, and went to make coffee. I’m not actually a fan of coffee but it helps me pretend to be awake during the day. I just make it taste as much like a milkshake as I can. After doing my morning routine and preparing the bean juice, I got ready to call her back, trying to figure out where to sit within the very compact four walls that I call an apartment. I decided on the small excuse for a living room, and put my coffee on the “vintage” coffee table that takes up more space that it should, courtesy of the thrift store and the 20 dollars I had that day. I fetched my laptop, moved my phone charger to that room, spent 5 minutes searching for my earbuds. I was finally ready after I ran back to my room one last time to get my laptop charger and a blanket.
I told Google to call her, put my earbuds on, and waited.
“Took you long enough,” she said.
“Hello to you too.”
“We already did that. Did you make sure you have everything you need?”
“Of course.”
“Okay, because once we get started—”
“—I know. You don’t like taking breaks in the middle of research.”
“Exactly. Are you ready Watson?”
“Wait why am I Watson” I asked.
“Because you fall asleep instead of doing research my dear Watson.”
I rolled my eyes.
“I saw that,” she said.
“You did not,” I paused. “Let’s just start Sherlock.”
“That’s more like it.” She giggled “So where did you see it? Let’s start there and true crime the heck out of this,” she said.
I told her everything I could remember about the location, but other than that, we didn’t have much to work with. No plates or anything. Surprisingly enough, she found a single news report on it. It was local, from the county where the accident was in.
Troup County Times
Last night this quiet county saw one of the worst accidents it’s seen in a long time. Between 2:50-3:00am, an Ice Cream Truck, driven by the now deceased Fredrick Stone, overturned and caught fire after evading police capture. It is believed that Stone was unable to escape the vehicle before it caught fire, but there has been no official word as to whether or not he survived the crash or why he was being pursued. All of Stone’s known acquaintances have declined to make a statement and the Troup County Police and Fire Departments have also declined statements until their investigations have been concluded.
With that, all we can say now is that we will keep the public updated to the best of our ability, and that we wish the friends and family of Mr. Stone our deepest condolences in their time of loss.
-TCT
“So, you found an article that says that they don’t know anything,” I said.
“I found an article with a name that mentions that he was wanted by the police for something. Or that even if he wasn’t officially WANTED he was doing something sketchy enough to not want them to catch him in that Ice Cream Truck,” she said.
“You watch too many True Crime shows”.
“Or you don’t watch enough. But be serious. That’s a clue.”
“Okay Scooby Doo,” I laughed.
She scoffed, “You got jokes, but just look. I found him.”
“You’re kidding!”
“I don’t kid about research” she cleared her throat jokingly, “Fredrick Stone, also known as Fred Flintstone in his more notorious circles… GIRL, HE’S A METH DEALER!” She exclaimed.
“What?! There’s no way you found that out so quickly.”
“You can find anything on the internet. Anyway, it’s really surprising how dumb drug dealers are. He probably had brain damage from breathing in those fumes. That’s if he cooks himself or at least goes to where they make it.”
My phone dinged and when I checked it, she’d sent me a picture of him. He was a very scruffy and thin white man with long brown hair. He wasn’t tall, just lanky. He actually didn’t look too far off from Shaggy from Scooby Doo, and I almost laughed. In the picture he was holding a cigarette between his lips and a beer at his side by the neck of the bottle. He was looking at the camera like he didn’t actually want his picture taken. Off in the distance—in the background of the picture—amongst the many cars lined up in the yard, all of which were probably there to be fixed, was an Ice Cream Truck—the ice cream cone still affixed to the top of it.
“Oh my God! This is him. That’s the truck in the picture,” I said.
“I can’t believe you actually doubted me.”
“What now?”
“What now? Now we find out why he was running from the cops at 3am.”
“Have you ever considered a career change?” I joked.
“Be serious,” she said.
“I am,” I said playfully.
“You are not. So you’re going to get a task. So you can focus.”
“Fine.”
“See if you can figure out anything about where he gets his supply from. I’ll look up all the hierarchical structure stuff and see if I can get anything about the police investigation,” she said.
“You’re really creepy when you’re like this.”
“This is your project!!”
“Okay. I’m searching. I’ll check in, in 30 minutes,” I said and she agreed.
Thirty minutes passed and neither of us came up with much, so we gave it another 30 minutes, then an hour, then two hours. Eventually we pieced it together enough to satisfy us… well enough to satisfy Kyra and her true crime addiction. Here it is.
Fredrick Stone was, in fact, the boss of this smallish meth operation. It mostly serviced Troup County and a few neighboring counties. They also occasionally crossed the border into Alabama. Fredrick always went by Fred Flintstone, so if someone was looking for him or wanted to buy, they asked for Flintstone apparently. They also delivered and transported their products and supplies in Ice Cream Trucks which, surprisingly, functioned as Real Ice Cream Trucks during business hours. So, they didn’t always have drugs in them. Kyra’s theory about the Ice Cream Trucks was that they could pass off the chemical containers as ice cream containers or things to help keep ice cream cold, which wasn’t a bad theory. According to Flintstone’s ice cream Instagram page, the different ice cream selections corresponded to what kind and how much “product” you wanted to buy.
Apparently, the chemist, who was not Fred—we couldn’t get a name for them, Kyra tried—had recently come up with a new… flavor? Or maybe it was a higher quality or something, but either way, it was about to be available, and it was listed as Strawberry Fudgesicle. It was going to be the most expensive thing on the menu yet.
One of the— I guess I’d call them employees— made some posts about it on a personal page. One of the posts talked about the quality of the new product, and the other boasted about the success of a recent heist to obtain the supplies required to produce this new product. Apparently, anything you could get “over the counter” or “legally” (I’d take that with a grain of salt), wasn’t good enough for this stuff.
So, this is how we pieced the crash together. If Me and Kyra could find all of this information in a matter of hours, it probably wouldn’t be hard for the cops either, and odds were that they were much closer to him than we were. All the chemicals he had to transport for the meth were probably as flammable as they come, and Fred was definitely a smoker. They had just stolen a ton of stuff and needed to get it back to Troup from wherever it came from or wherever it was stashed, and the police knew that or should have. So, this is how it played out. At least in our minds.
***
Fred and the gang had just pulled off this successful chemical heist maybe one or two days ago, but they had to stash the stuff, because going back with it immediately would be suspicious. So, they left it somewhere safe enough and planned to go back for it. You couldn’t go back during the day, because loading that kind of stuff during daylight was also suspicious. So do it at night. But Freddy didn’t know that the cops were on to him because his employee had been bragging about it all over social media. The cops were posted all along the highway waiting for him all week probably.
The night finally came, and he drove out to get the goods. Loaded everything up and started to make his way back when out of nowhere those blue lights started flashing in his mirrors and the sirens were screaming at him. But he wasn’t going down without a fight; this was Fred Flintstone. He set his mind to outrun them, in an Ice Cream Truck. Pedal to the Metal, they flew over the same hill that I did. It was looking good for Fred. He was flying. He had a freshly lit cigarette in his mouth. Then, he saw that the road curved a little up ahead. He had some good headway and could get away with slowing down a little for the curve. He went for the brakes, and nothing. He tried again, harder that time—because that’s always it, just a little more pressure—nothing again. He let up one more time and hit them again, but this time, in his frustration, he looked down at the brakes and not at the road in front of him. He looked up and saw the wall he was speeding towards. He redirected one way, then the other, the tires—unhappy—locked up, and the wheel followed suit just as he tried to frantically redirect again. He heard the containers banging against each other in the back of the truck but didn’t notice that they had shaken loose the bars that had secured them upright. Two of them toppled over right before the steering wheel locked up; the weight shift and the locked tires caused the truck to topple over.
The force of the falling containers hitting the metal wall of the truck as it impacted the asphalt cracked them open. Fred’s hands flew open as the truck tipped and in the whirlwind of chaos, the cigarette found its way to the back of the truck, landing in the expanding puddle of chemicals. Then, very flammable things did what they do best when they find a spark. The cop who was chasing Fred, stopped in his tracks when Fred started swerving and was now on the radio with the emergency brigade trying to explain what just happened, but the truth is that he didn’t really know either. And at the end of the day, no one got to try the new Strawberry Fudgesicle.
Cherish Collins is an adjunct English instructor at Kennesaw State University where she earned her Master of Arts in Professional Writing with a Creative Writing focus and Composition and Rhetoric support area. She also has a Graduate Certificate in Professional Writing for International Audiences. Her work is published in Aaduna Magazine, Hairstreak Butterfly Review, and Vinyle Zine. Her research and writing interests includes: Diasporic Women’s Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, African American Literature, Comparative Literature, Afrofuturism, Psychological Thrillers, Inverted Mystery, and Psychological Mystery.