Dean Koontz - One Door Away From Heaven

"They'll never let me be a cop again, but my mind doesn't have a reset button. If I can't be a cop, I'll be a make-believe cop, like what I am now, and if someday I can't do this. Well, then, "

When he trailed off, she finished for him: "Then screw it."

Noah smiled. This was one reason he liked her. Class and style without pretension. "Exactly."

The suite featured contemporary decor. The honey-toned, bird's-eye maple entertainment center, with ebony accents, was a modified obelisk, not gracefully tapered like a standard obelisk, but of chunky proportions. The open doors revealed a large TV screen.

Instead of seeking chairs, they remained standing for the show.

A single lamp glowed. Like a jury of ghosts, ranks of shadows gathered in the room.

Earlier Noah had loaded the tape in the VCR. Now he pushed PLAY on the remote control.

On screen: the residential street in Anaheim. The camera tilted down from a height, focusing on the house of the congressman's lover.

"That's a severe angle," Mrs. Sharmer said. "Where were you?"

"I'm not shooting this. My associate is at an attic window of the place across the street. We made financial arrangements with the owner. It's item number seven on your final bill."

The camera pulled back and angled down even more severely to reveal Noah's Chevrolet parked at the curb: battered but beloved steed, still ready to race when this had been shot, subsequently rendered into spare parts by a machine knacker.

"That's my car," he explained. "I'm behind the wheel."

The camera tilted up, panned right: A silver Jaguar approached through the early twilight. The car stopped at the paramour's house, a tall man got out of the passenger's door, and the Jaguar drove away.

Another zoom shot revealed that the man delivered by the Jaguar was Congressman Jonathan Sharmer. His handsome profile was ideal for stone monuments in a heroic age, though by his actions he had proved that he possessed neither the heart nor the soul to match his face.

Arrogance issued from him as holy light might radiate from the apparition of a saint, and he stood facing the street, head raised as though he were admiring the palette of the twilight sky.

"Because he keeps tabs on you, he's been on to me from the start, but he doesn't know that I know that he knows. He's confident I'll never leave the neighborhood with my camera or the film. Playing with me. He isn't aware of my associate in the attic."

Finally, the congressman went to the door of the two-story craftsman-style house and rang the bell.

A maximum-zoom shot captured the young brunette who answered the bell. In skintight shorts and a tube top stretched so extravagantly that it might kill bystanders if it snapped, she was temptation packaged for easy access.

"Her name's Karla Rhymes," Noah reported. "When she worked as a dancer, she called herself Tiffany Tush."

"Not a ballerina, I assume."

"She performed at a club called Planet Pussycat."

On the threshold, Karla and the politician embraced. Even in the fading light of dusk, and further obscured by the shade of the porch roof, their long kiss could not be mistaken for platonic affection.

"She's on the payroll of your husband's charitable foundation."

"The Circle of Friends."

More than friends, the couple on the TV were as close as Siamese twins, joined at the tongue.

"She gets eighty-six thousand a year," Noah said.

The video had been silent. When the kiss ended, sound was added: Jonathan Sharmer and his charity-funded squeeze engaged in something less than sparkling romantic conversation.

"Did this Farrel asshole really show up, Jonny?"

"Don't look directly. The old Chevy across the street."

"The scabby little pervert can't even afford a real car."

"My guys will junk it. He better have a bus pass for backup."

"I bet he's giving himself a hand job right now, watching us."

"I love your nasty mouth."

Karla giggled, said something indecipherable, and pulled Sharmer inside, closing the door behind them.

Constance Tavenall — no doubt soon to cleanse herself of the name Sharmer — stared at the TV. She had married the congressman five years ago, before the first of his three successful political campaigns. By creating the Circle of Friends, he wove an image as a compassionate thinker with innovative approaches to social problems, while marriage to this woman lent him class, respectability. For a husband utterly lacking in character, such a spouse was the moral equivalent of arm candy, meant to dazzle the cognoscenti, not with her beauty, but with her sterling reputation, making it less likely that Sharmer would be the object of suspicion or the subject of close scrutiny.

Considering that this had just now become incontestably clear to Constance, her composure was remarkable. The crudeness of what she heard lulled to fire a blush in her. If she harbored anger, she hid it well. Instead, a barely perceptible yet awful sadness manifested as a faint glister in her eyes.

"A highly efficient directional microphone was synchronized with the camera," Noah explained. "We've added a soundtrack only where we've got conversation that'll ruin him."

"A stripper. Such a cliche." Even in the thread of quiet sorrow that this tape spun around her, she found a thin filament of humor, the irony that is the mother-of-all in human relationships. "Jonathan cultivates an image of hip sophistication. The press see themselves in him. They'd forgive him anything, even murder, but they'll turn savage now because the cliche of this will embarrass them."

The tape went silent again as a perfectly executed time dissolve brought the viewer from twilight to full night on the same street.

"We're using a camera and special film with exceptional ability to record clear images in a minimum of light."

Noah half expected to hear ominous music building toward the assault on the Chevy. Once in a while, Bobby Zoon couldn't resist indulging in the techniques that he was learning in film school.

The first time that he'd worked for Noah, the kid had delivered a handsomely shot and effectively edited ten-minute piece showing a software designer trading diskettes containing his employer's most precious product secrets in return for a suitcase full of cash. The tape began with a title card that announced A Film by Robert Zoon, and Bobby was crushed when Noah insisted that he remove his credit.

In the Sharmer case, Bobby didn't catch the jolly approach of the Beagle Boys with their sledgehammer and tire iron. He focused on Karla's house, on the lighted window of an upstairs bedroom, where the gap between the half-closed drapes tantalized with the prospect of an image suitable for the front page of the sleaziest tabloid.

Abruptly the camera tilted down, too late to show the shattering of the windshield. Documented, however, were the bashing of the side window, Noah's eruption from the Chevy, and the gleeful capering of the two brightly costumed behemoths who obviously had learned all the wrong lessons from the morning cartoon programs that had been the Sole source of moral education during their formative years.

"No doubt," Noah said, "they were once troubled youths rescued from a life of mischief, and rehabilitated by the Circle of Friends. I expected to be spotted and warned off, but I thought the approach, however it came, would be a lot more discreet than this."

"Jonathan likes walking the edge. Risk excites him."

As proof of what Constance Tavenall had just said, the videotape cut from the Chevy to the soft light at the bedroom window across the street. The drapes had been pulled aside. Karla Rhymes stood at the pane, as though showcased: visible above the waist, nude. Jonathan Sharmer, also nude, loomed behind her, hands on her bare shoulders.