“Can I put in on just one more time,” she cooed batting her cobalt blue eyelids in the way that got her the stone in the first place.
The marshal knew better but agreed. The little marshal was doing his thinking for him.
He reached into the box in his pocket that he was escorting to his superiors at the federal lockup along with the traveling companion he was cuffed to. She would stay on there for a while as a rent-free guest of Uncle Sam. The sparkler would be returned to its red-faced owner.
The marshal did not know the whole story of how she had swiped it from the old coot but he could use his imagination.
He handed the ring to her across the armrest, surprised that it didn’t cause the plane to lurch under its heft. She slid it on like she had been born with it.
Then she nodded off. The marshal napped as well, until she poked him awake asking, checking her watch, if she could use the john. He didn’t see how she could get up to any trouble up here. There was no room for an escort anyway.
***
When she returned, he focused on her wiggle, not bothering to pay attention to anything as insignificant as a digit. It wasn’t until the plane landed that he noticed the ring was missing.
The lead flight attendant, however, had a better eye for the finer things. She had noticed the eye-popping rock on its trip into the loo and its absence on the return.
The marshal almost googled an application for a night security gig at Kohls thinking his days of federal service were over. But then he collected himself.
Somewhere nearby in the empty desert, in a deserted valley among the dusty cactus scrubs, a guy in a convertible turned on the best quality high-powered metal detector money could buy on the black market. Military grade. He had hocked most of their assets to afford it but if his baby had timed things right and their assumption about the airline’s waste dumping protocols was accurate then he shouldn’t be that far away from a chunk of frozen blue worth a king’s ransom. It was an area quite a bit bigger than a haystack to search but hey, not every needle can fetch you 8 figures.
Unfortunately, the lovestruck felons had not done their research. The FAA had put an end to such indiscriminate in-flight off-loading long ago.
This the lead flight attendant knew well. She phoned ahead before landing to her friend in baggage and incentivized him to highjack the biowaste removal truck and beat the Feds to the plane by promising half the proceeds of what he would find there.
Unfortunately for her, another person aware of this protocol was the marshal. He cuffed his travel partner to her seat, opened the emergency door and kicked out the escape slide to activate its inflation. He slid down and quickly nabbed the accomplice emptying the tank. The stomach-turning salvage job ahead of him was small price to pay to keep his job.
The lead flight attendant witnessed all of this through the porthole. As she locked eyes with her restrained passenger, she realized she was losing a life-changing dowery but gaining a new long-term roommate.
[Image Credit : Photo by NEOM on Unsplash]
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