Amen Corner (42 page)

She might have been stunned by the answer.

When Sam had gone back to the tournament headquarters with Porter and Brisbane, he was expecting a warm thank-you and a check for, what—$20,000? Maybe as much as $50,000. After all, these guys were rich, he'd helped save the tournament for them, and there had been bombs and bullets flying.

The check Porter wrote was for $250,000.

Sam started to ask if they could afford it, then almost laughed at himself. They'd probably spent more on shrimp this week.

“That's a lot of money,” was all Sam managed to say.

“That's a fraction of what we paid Frank Naples today for winning,” Porter said, with the first genuinely friendly smile Sam had seen from him all week. “Naples is a great guy and a hell of a golfer, but if he'd stayed in Texas, we'd still have had a Masters.”

“You deserve that check as much as Naples deserves his,” Brisbane said. “More, really.”

Yet Sam couldn't bring himself to tell Caroline what he'd been paid. He wanted to see her again, but he didn't want money, or his job, to influence whether she wanted to see him again.

“They paid me enough,” he finally answered her.

Enough to quit the cops. Enough to do something else. Maybe open his own investigations office, taking only the work that interested him. Maybe spend some time in Arizona…

That's what he wanted to tell her, but it would have to wait. Wait until Caroline made up her mind about him, and about who and what she wanted now that she was through with Shane Rockingham.

Gladys Knight and the Pips were singing “Neither One of Us Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye” as the car pulled up to the curb in front of the terminal. The sob in Gladys' voice over the end of a love affair had never sounded more sincere.

“You timed that,” Caroline said.

“If my timing were only that good,” Sam said.

He helped her take her suitcase out of the trunk. They kissed, and Caroline walked into the terminal.

Neither one of them said goodbye.

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