The End of the Dream (16 page)

Finally, Scott turned on his heel and walked out. Kevin realized at that moment that Scott had never intended to let him have the barn to paint in. Almost two decades of committed friendship were now history.

Kevin had to accept that they weren’t friends now not in the way they had been. Scott had always been Willie-Boss, now he wanted to be more than that. Every one on the place everyone except Kevin tiptoed around Scott, waiting for orders, waiting for approval, waiting to find out when they
 
could breathe or sleep or take a crap. But Kevin remained his own man. Mark Biggins was the caretaker of Scott’s empire, and for a long time, he had done a good job. He built fences and cleared away brush.

He watched over Seven Cedars while Scott traveled. He collected his $1,000 a month and had free room and board. But, when Traci moved in, things didn’t work as well. They needed more space. So now Mark lived off the place, as did Kevin. Kevin quit work on the barn and quietly moved his painting supplies back to Ellen’s place. They still came down to visit, Kevin couldn’t bring himself to walk away completely.

The good memories were still too strong. It was 1991 and Scott Scurlock was no longer a big spender. Now more than ever, he lost himself in adventure movies, identifying with both the good guys or bad guys, whoever handled their lives the most deftly. Scott watched certain movies many times. In 1991, he was mesmerized by with Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves. The lead characters were so like himself, Kevin, Steve, Mark and the others who called Seven Cedars home.

Swayze played Bodie, a surfer-cum-bankrobber, Reeves a kind of renegade FBI agent who was caught halfway between the world of the splendid surfers and the uptight senior agents who lectured him. Point Break was antiestablishmentit was all about taking chances and the renegade camaraderie of a group of men. Bodie’s gang of bank robbers called themselves the “ex-Presidents” and wore latex masks of Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Lyndon Johnson. They didn’t seem so villainous, really, the way they leapt on counters and waved the guns they never used. It was an inside joke, the damned politicians in Washington, DC, had robbed the working stiffs, and now they were robbing the banks, the symbolic center of greedy big business. At some point, and no one can now say when, William Scott Scurlock, thirty-nine years old and at -the end of his financial tether, visualized himself standing in place of Patrick Swayze. In his mind, he stepped into the movie and became its hero. He began to study adventure movies in earnest, as if he believed that screenwriters really knew how to outwit cops and FBI agents. FX was another major influence on him. It taught him how to use makeup to disguise himself so completely that even his mother wouldn’t recognize him. He rented that movie so many times that he almost wore it out. “Look, “ he told friends, “look how they can change. Watch it again.. ..”

“It’s a movie, Willie-Boss, “ someone said. “It’s not real.” Why wasn’t it, Scott asked. Why couldn’t movies be real? He had been a film nut as long as they had known him. He was caught somewhere between myth and the most brutal depictions of reality. Scott Scurlock, born in 1955, had always taken great pride in the fact that he was a direct descendant of Doc Scurlock, who rode with Billy the Kid in another place, another time.

Half joking (or seeming to half joke), Scott had once suggested to Mark Biggins that they should pull a bank robbery.

Biggins figured he was kidding, and laughed. Now it seemed not to be a joke at all. Scott kept studying movies about bank robbers, and he became obsessed with books about famous bank robbers. He learned everything that he could about what had worked and what had not.

Still, he was more influenced by movies and folklore, fables and fiction, than by the gritty reality of real bank robberies. Instead, he became entranced with the infamy and the folk-hero stature of these men, letting his mind skip past the ghastly black-and-white photographs of their morgue photos, their heads propped on wooden blocks and bodies full of bullet holes, while proud lawmen posed next to them. Scott had groomed both Steve Meyers and Mark Biggins to the point that they would do what he asked. In a sense, they no longer had wills of their own although they might have argued that they had. By being first their friend and then their benefactor, Scott had reeled them in.

What followed next seemed natural and right. He was headed for another adventure, a different kind of experiment, and he would share the game with his friends, just as he always had.
 
In the spring of 1992, Scott began to talk seriously about emulating his Great Uncle Doc. He approached Mark one night when the two of them were drinking. Mark Biggins realized that this time Scott was not talking about “What ifs?

“ He was talking about when and where.

“Let’s rob a bank, “ Scott said enthusiastically. It was a conversation that Mark could never have imagined being part of. He tried to kid Scott out of it, but it didn’t work. Scott said he had scouted out a bank in Seattle and had already worked out a plan. There is no question that Mark Biggins should have walked away. But he didn’t. He was broke, Traci had been after him to make more money so they wouldn’t have to live like paupers. Lori needed things. He agreed to go with Scott to look at the bank.

Sometime in the middle of June, the two men drove to the Madison Park area of Seattle. It was a good distance from downtown and from any of the Seattle Police Department precincts. It was, however, also a good distance from the entrance to a freeway and a quick getaway. Scott had thought about a number of variables, but he hadn’t considered their escape very carefully. By the middle of June 1992, everything seemed to be in place for Scott Scurlock’s plan. It was actually a rather stupid plan, full of pitfalls, a script that might have worked in a movie but had little basis in reality. Scott enlisted Traci, too, who was far more eager to be involved than Mark, who got queasy at the very thought of it. Scott outlined his plan to them, Traci would be the driver and Mark would be in charge of crowd control. Scott and Mark would go into the bank wearing disguises and carrying guns.

The. y would wear gloves so they wouldn’t leave fingerprints. They would scoop the cash packets out of the tellers’ trays and be out of the bank before anyone knew what had hit them. Their first target was the Sea first Bank at 4112 Madison Avenue. Traci drove Scott’s blue van and dropped Mark and Scott off a block away from the bank shortly before noon on Thursday, June 25. Scott wore makeup and a fake nose, Mark wore a Ronald Reagan mask. Their weakest link was their getaway vehicle.
 
Scott didn’t want to use his own van because it could be traced back to him. He told Mark to watch for a customer who drove up in a car that looked dependable but not flashy and to remember that driver. Once in the bank, and during the robbery, Mark was to take the person’s car keys. Then they would leave in the designated car, ditch it, and meet up with Traci at a prearranged spot. “Nobody will ever know what we arrived in, “ Scott explained. Mark watched a customer drive up to the bank in a blue
 
Cadillac, and memorized what the man looked like, White male.. .
 
medium height.. . graying red hair.

.

.. “Let’s go, “ Scott breathe , and, suddenly, they were in the bank.

Scott leapt up on the teller counter, just like Bodie had in Point Break, shouting “This is a hold-up. Don’t anybody move! “ Then he jumped nimbly behind the line of tellers. Mark watched as Scott scooped cash out of the tellers’ drawers. Mark thought he must be in a dream. He felt the gun in his hand and waved it around, aware of the fear that was almost palpable among the customers and the employees.

He told the customers to lie down on the floor. He just wanted to be out of there. Like a sleepwalker, he walked to the tellers’ area, and was ready to grab money as Scott had instructed. But then he looked at his hands and saw that he had forgotten to put on gloves.

They were still in his pocket. Scott finished gathering money and ran back to Mark, “You have the keys? “

“No .. . no, I forgot.”

“Let’s get them, “ Scott barked and Mark walked to the man who’d driven the blue Cadillac. “May I have your keys, sir?

Don’t worry. I won’t hurt your car.” The man was lying facedown on the floor, and he had to dig in his pants pocket awkwardly to find his key ring. He handed over his car keys, and Scott and Mark ran from the bank.
 
As they neared the door, Scott turned around and said, “As long as nobody sets off the alarm, we won’t have to come back and shoot anybody, “ and then he grinned and shouted, “Thank you! Have a nice day.” They got into the Cadillac, and Mark tried to start it, but he was so scared that he only ground the motor. It felt like hours before it finally started. When it did, he drove to the parking lot where Traci was supposed to meet them. Only she wasn’t there.
 
Mark was terrified. He had known all along that it wasn’t going to work.

They abandoned the stolen Cadillac and raced down an alley. A huge dog, chained in an adjacent yard, lunged at the fence and Mark felt its breath. He practically ran up Scott’s back. He heard Scott laughing.

He was enjoying this. They had talked of a backup meeting spot, and they leapt over a fence onto the golf course of the extremely posh, gated Broadmoor community. Golfers saw them coming two men in masks carrying a bag of money and they stopped, open-mouthed , in midswing.

Incredibly, nobody tried to stop them. At a little stone restroom, Scott stopped to wash off his makeup. Traci was where she was supposed to be this time. The two men leapt into Scott’s van and Traci headed toward the northernmost floating bridge connecting Seattle to Mercer Island, then eased onto 405 South until it merged with I-5. They were on their way to Olympia and the treehouse. No one was hurt, and they had a bag of money $19,971 to be precise. Scott and Traci shouted with excitement all the way home, while Mark sobbed, “I’m never going to do this again.
 
Never.” Scott looked at him in the rearview mirror, his eyes full of disgust. “Traci, “ he said.

“You are going to be my Number One Man to rob banks with. We can’t deal with you, Biggins. You lost it in there. You were shaking.

You are one lousy bank robber.” It was clear that Scott and Traci were riding an adrenaline rush, triumphant that they had actually done it.

As soon as they got back to Seven Cedars, Mark went into the house and packed his and Traci’s belongings in suitcases and duffel bags. He carried them out to their ancient station wagon.

When everything was packed, he went to get Traci. Thank God, Lori was with her mother in California. “We’re going, Traci, “ he said. “We’re moving. We’re never going to do anything like that again.”

“You don’t even have your share of the money, “ Scott said, incredulously.

“I don’t want it. Come on, Traci.

“

“I’m staying with Scott, “ she said. “I’m his Number One Man.

“ It took every persuasive tactic that Mark Biggins had to get his girlfriend away from Seven Cedars. She had the same glitter of excitement in her eyes that Scott did as they counted out and divided the money. Once she grudgingly got in the car, he headed toward Oregon, where they stayed one night in a motel. The next day, they drove to Idaho and east into Hamilton, Montana, near the Bitterroot National Forest. During the entire trip, Mark kept his ear tuned for sirens, expecting to see flashing blue lights behind him. It seemed impossible, but apparently they had gotten away clean. Mark and Traci stayed for a few weeks at the Lost Horse Resort, and it was an edgy, tight-lipped time between them.

In August, they rented a tiny house in Darby, Montana. Mark got a job building log cabins. They made friends with people in town, and on the surface they seemed to be an ordinary young couple struggling to make ends meet.
 
But Mark needed to find out what was happening back in Washington. He had to know if anyone was looking for him. He made phone calls, . but he couldn’t find Scott. He finally got in touch with some friends who said that, as far as they knew, Scott hadn’t been arrested for anything. Why would he be? He’d been off on some trip, but he was doing just fine. In the meantime, he had someone else handling all the stuff that Mark used to do, Steve Meyers. After a while, Mark began to think that they truly had missed disaster with the elusive luck that so often had abandoned him. Nobody came looking for him. No police knocked on the door of their little place in Darby. He dared to take a deep breath. Mark had good reason to breathe easy. If he and Scott never pulled another bank robbery, the chances were excellent that they wouldn’t be caught. All the FBI had were four electrostatic lifts of latent fingerprints (single fingers) from the bank counter, two photographs of shoe prints, and five dust prints of shoes. No two witnesses seemed to agree on what they looked like beyond the consensus that they were both male and probably white.

Age estimates varied from twenties to mid-fifties, and some thought that Scott was thin while others said he had a potbelly. Most of them remembered that Mark had worn a Ronald Reagan mask, and one woman saw curly hair on the back of his head. Any one who has studied witnesses’ memories of events knows that under severe stress, such recall is often flawed, six people witnessing the exact same scene will often give as many descriptions. And that is what happened on June 25, 1992.

However, the FBI lab’s criminalists compared some of the shoe prints they had lifted at the bank with known treads and deduced that they came from a “Converse All-Star brand, or another brand having a very similar out sole design.” Scott had worn All-Stars since he was a kid.

He had hiked the Grand Canyon and climbed Mount Rainier in Converse All-Stars. Now, he had worn them in another “sport, “ and left behind physical evidence that he was completely unaware of. Not Nikes. Not Reebok. Scott would one day regret that he had such undying brand loyalty.

PART THREE

Mike and Shawn . in One of the ironies of true life “cops and robbers” is that, given other circumstances, the hunted and the hunters might well have been friends. Often they have backgrounds that are not as dissimilar as we might expect. And yet, somewhere along the line some added ingredient, some catalyst, or even some genetic predisposition makes some favor the law while others flaunt it. The detective who dedicates a good portion of his waking hours to tracking a high-profile offender carriesalwaysan image in his mind of whom he is looking for. He may be wrong, of course, but, amazingly, he is often right. The “successful” criminal focuses on protecting his identity, while the investigator tries to think like the man he hunts. In the end, it almost seems as if their hearts have synchronized to beat at the same rate and they draw breaths at the same time, one leads and the other steps in his tracks. Ultimately, they end up in the same place at the same time. They have become fraternal if aberrant “twins.” Almost every law officer who becomes obsessed with and possessed by the desire to capture a particularly adroit criminal dreams of the moment when they will meet face to face.