I Am Going to Need to See That Book, Sir

There was no bomb, of course. D. B. Cooper—or rather, Donald B. Cooper, as the man in the dark suit and wraparound sunglasses actually called himself—was a librarian. Specifically, a collections-recovery specialist for the Multnomah County Library, and you don’t get to that position without a certain granite integrity. The polite notes had failed. The sternly worded telegrams, costing the county $2.17 a pop, went ignored. The ransom, he explained with the weary patience of a man reciting the Dewey Decimal System to a child, was simply the accumulated fines on a single unreturned volume: a first-edition copy of *A Burglar’s Guide to the City*, checked out in 1968 by a Mr. Ralph Himmelsbach, address unknown.

The flight attendant, whose name he had noted was Tina, was not being helpful. "So, the briefcase...?" she asked. Don sighed. He clicked it open. Inside, nestled on a bed of tacky red velvet, was not a stick of dynamite but a library date stamp, an ink pad, and a very serious-looking copy of the *ALA Interlibrary Loan Code, 1968 Revision*. The four parachutes he’d demanded were a contingency. For the books. Obviously. He’d calculated the exact weight and drag coefficient for a standard 400-page hardcover, and four chutes gave him a 17.8% chance of a soft landing for his entire carry-on allowance.

Everything went wrong over the Lewis River. His meticulous plan, which involved a gentle, controlled descent into a pre-scouted clearing near a 24-hour diner, had not accounted for the Pacific Northwest’s primary export: atmospheric misery. The wind shear that hit him at 8,000 feet was, in technical library terms, a Category 5 dick-move. The briefcase, containing both his honorarium and the sacred date stamp, was ripped from his grasp. The satchel with the parachutes for the *other* overdue books he’d planned to liberate from Clark County’s list of shame followed it a moment later. He spent the next forty-seven minutes tumbling through the icy blackness, clinging to his own chute’s D-ring and composing a strongly worded letter of complaint to the Federal Aviation Administration in his head.

Don Cooper hit the ground hard, concussed and twenty-three miles off course. He woke up in a ditch, sodden and defeated. The money was gone. The stamp was gone. His tie, a tasteful clip-on, was gone. He was just another schmuck in a ruined suit with nothing to show for it but a profound distrust of regional weather patterns. He burned the suit, bought a bus ticket to somewhere sunny, and never set foot in a library again. He didn’t have to. For the next thirty years, nobody in the Pacific Northwest dared return a book late. Libraries reported a 98.4% on-time return rate, a figure unheard of in municipal governance. They called it the "Cooper Dividend." Every so often, a terrified logger would find a few sodden twenties in a creek bed and, fearing the wrath of the quiet man from the sky, would anonymously mail them to the nearest card catalog.