The homeless man raised questions for which Georgia had no answers, so she swung back to Benny’s to wait for Bruce Kreisman. An hour later he hadn’t shown up, so she went inside. It was midafternoon but business was still brisk. She ordered a bowl of matzoh-ball soup to go, and when they handed her the white bag at the take-out counter, she asked about Kreisman.
“Oh, he no here,” one of the Hispanic women said, her accent thick.
Georgia frowned. “Your delivery guy just left?”
“Sí. Almost una hora, one hour now.”
“Did he say where he was going? Or when he’d be back?”
The woman shook her head. “He say he have important business. But you know, boss is no happy. He could fire.” She clucked her tongue. “You wan’ I tell him you come?”
It was Georgia’s turn to shake her head. “It’s not important.” She carried her soup back to the car, not liking the fact that he was doing some “business.” Especially since she’d given him her card.
She ate her soup in the car, then headed to the Eisenhower. She figured she could make it to Oakbrook where Susie’s Café was before rush hour. But traffic was building and progress was slow, which gave her time to eye the billboards on the side of the freeway. Signs for McDonald’s, a gambling casino, and a car dealer flashed by, but after those was a black billboard with a photo of a pregnant African American girl who couldn’t have been more than twelve. Fuchsia letters blasted the words “People who have sex with children are criminals. Stop teen pregnancy.”
Georgia gripped the wheel. She wasn’t a proponent of unmarried pregnancy without a damn good reason. Despite her Catholic upbringing, she used to recommend abortions for the pregnant hookers she busted when she was on patrol. Until the day she’d been downtown at a museum and wandered into a shamelessly pro-life exhibit. She mentally prepared herself not to be swayed, but one of the display cases showed actual three-dimensional models of what fetuses looked like at various stages of pregnancy. Even at twelve weeks, the model looked remarkably like a tiny baby. When she realized those tiny beings were alive, she’d had to flee the museum. Once in a while, images of those babies still came unbidden.
She snapped on the radio. The all-news station was predicting four to five new inches of snow, and a few errant snowflakes were already landing on her windshield. She would be caught in traffic after all.