I spent the complete next day waiting for a other shoe to fall. It never did. I managed to get the 'image of the day' shot. It was an image of a historic district house, which had some nice lines. I even managed to get Misty to stand on the porch and look wistfully at the lens. The camera was good enough to catch her expression and the lines of the house as well.

In the process I made friends with the president of the Hysterical society. that contact guaranteed me limited access to all the historical sites in town. I thought that I might do a set of postcards based on a walking tour of the hysterical district. It would be nice to have Misty tag along, but she had school and Molly to worry about so it wasn't likely she would be in them all.

I didn't have any papers to deliver that day, so with my image of the day made, I settled in to learn more about the performance of the batteries I had purchased. I tried to put the whole Charlie/Robbie thing out of my mind. Since I carried the .38 snubbie where ever I went, it was difficult.

"I thought you might want to know the brothers badass were denied bail." The voice on the other end of the cell phone belonged to Louise.

"So when do they go to trial?" I asked.

"Depends on what they have to say to the DA. He is offering to drop the death penalty, if they plead out and roll on the guys in New Jersey."

"That better be all he drops," I said.

"We already told him no immunity or he will be seeing Charlie sooner than he would like. The feds want in, but the DA is going to scream holy hell. He reminded that it's an election year just in case they try to force a take over . None of them want that kind of publicity. We told the DA an old ex-cop who still had plenty of connections, would be happy to make an election issue of it. I'm pretty sure Charlie is going to get justice."

"Well I have seen a lot of immunity deals," I replied.

"Well we reminded the DA, this ain't one thug killing another thug. Charlie was a cop and they haven't been able to hang a dirty cop tag around his neck."

So that was why she was calling. She wanted to be sure that I wasn't going to put the stink on Charlie. "Don't worry Louise, I got nothing I can say about Charlie."

"I never thought you would have anything to say." I began to wonder why Louise had been so hot not to have Charlie's laundry aired. I began to wonder how clean her panties were. I could ask around, but I didn't really care anymore. I was off the line, and damn happy to be off now that all this crap was coming down.

I ordered a large pizza for dinner. I figured it was time I broke the diet. I had lost over ten pounds in the few short weeks since my retirement. Pizza and diet coke wasn't much of a celebration, unless the celebrator had been living on a diet of dry hamburger and salad. The pizza dough was a real treat.

The delivery was by a young woman with a can of pepper stray hanging from her belt. That was probably a good idea, considering she had no idea who would come to the door. Lots of bad people in the world, and even more good people who once in a while did terrible things to each other.

I ate half the pizza, then stashed the other half in the fridge. I Watched more of the old SciFi channel drama on the net, then I went to bed exhausted from doing mostly nothing.