Part 78, page 9

Transcript

The scan is the source; the transcript is machine-generated from it.

This was a very dramaturgical caper, indeed. It may be a pilot for a TV series. A bunch of us at a cocktail party over the weekend, was running up scenarios, to comply with the iron law of the movies that no one gets away with a Big Heist and that the cuter the heist the cuter must be the quirk of fate whereby the heister is disap- pointed of his swag.

Someone started it with the rudimentary idea that our hijacker jumps from the plane with the money and his parachute doesn't open. Too crude. Uncute.

Another was that the guy straps on a parachute and the moneybag, then jumps. He pulls the ripcord, but it is the cord to the moneybag and $200,000 in double-saw- bucks fills the air while he plummets downward saying "Oh shucks!"

A macabre idea was for him to come down in the for- est. His chute snags on a tree and the 20-odd pounds of money tied round his neck, slowly strangles him.

Naturally, I prefer my plot device. The hijacker, a sea- soned professional sky-diver, gets his rigging all squared away. He's wearing two parachutes for insurance, he has the money safely strapped on his person.

He exits the aircraft, cooly calculates his free fall and pops the chute perfectly.

He makes a perfect land- ing — inside the walls of the Washington State Penitentiary.

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DB Cooper-33797