‘Mister Squishee,’ now said the agent to his right in a baritone that didn’t go with his body at all. ‘Fourteen Mister Squishee iterant-route frozen-confection S corp out of East Peoria trucks seized together with office facilities, receivables, and equity holdings of four out of the seven members of the family who owned what the Region’s counsel convinced the Seventh Circuit was de facto a privately held S corp,’ Bondurant said. ‘Disgruntled employee, falsified depreciation schedules for everything from freezers to trucks like this here—’
‘Jeopardy assessment,’ Sylvanshine said, mostly to show he knew the lingo. The seat directly ahead of Sylvanshine was unoccupied, yielding a view of the crossed and meaty neck of whoever sat ahead of that, his head covered by a Busch hat pushed back to communicate relaxation and informality.
‘This is an ice-cream truck?’
‘Wonderful for morale, isn’t it? Like the paint job fools anybody that you’ve got the Post’s cream riding back in something that used to sell Nutty Buddies and was driven by a guy in a big lumpy white outfit and rubber face so he looked like a blancmange.’
‘Driver used to drive this for Mister Squishee.’
‘That’s why we’re going so slowly.’
‘Limit’s fifty-five; take a look at what-all’s stacked up behind us flashing their brights if you want.’
The smaller, pinker man, Britton, had a round, downy face. He was in his thirties and it wasn’t clear if he shaved. The odd thing was that Sylvanshine’s neighborhood in King of Prussia had been a planned community, with speed bumps, whose neighborhood association had prohibited solicitation of any kind, especially with a calliope — Sylvanshine had never in his life chased an ice-cream truck.
‘Driver still bonded — the seizure just went through last quarter, the DD decides that the margin on keeping the trucks and drivers in service through the length of the bond so outweighs what’s realized auctioning them that everybody below G-11 now rides in Mister Squishee trucks,’ Bondurant said. His hand moved with his chin when he spoke, which struck Sylvanshine as awkward-looking and false.
‘Mrs. Short-Run Thinking.’
‘Terrible for morale. Not to mention the PR debacle of kids and their parents seeing trucks they associate with innocence and delicious Caramel Crunch Pushups now seized and as it were shanghaied by the Service. Including surveillance.’
‘We conduct surveillance in these trucks, if you can believe it.’