Disclaimer: This is a work of fan fiction. No profit is being made from its publication. All DM characters are property of CBS/Viacom. All other characters are property of the authors.
Authors' note: This story is part of an experiment in writing taken on by The Sloans' Deck Writing Group. One author wrote the story starter, and the remaining members were divided into two separate groups to pursue two different story lines. This story is Version One simply by virtue of it being finished first. Version Two will be posted when Version One is finished. One thing we at the Deck found interesting was how certain scenes were similar in each story, and yet very different. We would love to know what you think. Please, R&R.
A Father's Love, Version One
Chapter One: Product of the Past
"Dr. Sloan," Captain Jim Newman said with as much patience as he could muster. "You don't need to testify. The D.A. can get a conviction without you. Besides, even if Tucker does get off, Steve can identify them. What we need to do is find him."
Mark pressed his hands to the table to stop their trembling and he slipped his tongue between his back teeth to keep from grinding them. After several deep breaths, he finally lifted his head and looked Captain Newman in the eye.
"For the last time, Cletus Baxter doesn't care if I testify. Tucker's Public Defender told him the D.A. could get a conviction on the physical evidence alone," he explained with failing patience.
Newman said something about not being able to delay the trial, but Mark tuned him out. He was not going to compromise until he had all the information and support he needed to help him save his son.
"Baxter told me his grandson didn't commit that murder, and that if I wanted to see Steve alive again, I would find a way to prove him innocent," Mark repeated for the fifth time. "Donald just seemed to be along for the ride. He promised me they wouldn't hurt Steve and that as soon as I cleared Tucker's name, they would send him home safe and sound."
"Dr. Sloan, we have an APB out on the Baxters and their truck. Every cop in LA is looking for them. They can't get far."
"I don't care what you're doing," Mark said in a level, but disdainful, voice, "and I do think you have underestimated Cletus Baxter. I just want to review all the files on Tucker's case, so if they contact me, I can convince them that I am trying to meet their demands. I also want you to assign Cheryl to work with me on this, and I want it all within the hour or I will call my friend at the LA Times and tell the story to him. Do you understand me?"
A small vein began to pulse in Jim Newman's forehead, and a muscle in his jaw started to twitch. He knew Mark Sloan well enough to realize that while he might try to trick killers into revealing themselves, he didn't make idle threats when it came to protecting his son. He also knew that there was no way he could get Mark to back off after stupidly pointing out that Steve didn't stand a chance of being returned safely, because even if Tucker were acquitted, he could identify his kidnappers, and they would go to jail if they returned him. After a long moment, he opened his cell phone and speed-dialed the precinct.
"Detective Banks, pack up everything we have on Tucker Baxter and bring it to Dr. Sloan's beach house. It seems that after years of helping us put away criminals, the good doctor wants to start working for the defense."
Newman closed his phone and looked at Mark. The two men locked gazes for a long, tense moment, and then Newman rose from the table and showed himself out.
Sloans' Deck
Steve arched his back and groaned as he tried to relieve some of the strain on his shoulders, but a sharp blow to his abdomen, probably from the butt of a rifle, interrupted his efforts. He fell off the spare tire on which he was sitting. As he lay on the floor of the truck doubled over and gasping for air, a hard kick to his kidneys sent a hot surge of pain through his entire body, and he grunted in pain. With his hands cuffed behind him there was no way he could defend himself, so he decided it was best to just lie still and pretend he had passed out.
"Ya were told to sit still and be quiet," Cletus Baxter's gravelly voice grated on his ears. "So help me God, ya will learn to mind me or die tryin', boy!"
"Pa, stop it!" Donald Baxter yelled through the window in the back of the cab of the truck. "I promised the Doc we wouldn't hurt him. What good will it do Tucker if we save him just to get ourselves executed for killing a cop?"
As the truck rattled and clattered over back roads, every bump and pothole jarred Steve's aching body. The black balaclava, which was tied snugly around his neck, stank strongly of mildew and the gag in his mouth tasted of motor oil. Every gasping breath he took carried the fumes and the moldy smell into his sinuses and lungs making him feel quite ill, and he could only pray that he wouldn't vomit into the gag. Beyond the mildew and oil, he detected the odors of livestock, manure, hay, and unwashed humanity. It would be just my luck to be kidnapped by the Beverly Hillbillies. Steve had nothing against agricultural workers or anyone else who worked hard for a living. The problem was, the Baxter family had something against him.
Steve knew from his investigation, which had often seemed more like recording an oral history than searching for a murderer, that the Baxter clan had started out as a hard working farm family, but things changed drastically for them during the Dust Bowl of the 1930's…
Sloans' Deck
At the young age of twenty-five, Horace Baxter had found himself in the position of family patriarch when his father died unexpectedly of a stroke in 1936. After five years of drought, young Horace lost the family farm to the bank. Seeing no future in the dried up, worn out dirt of the Oklahoma Panhandle, Horace had decided to move west. Fliers in every store, post office, and barbershop boasted of California's bountiful Central Valley and long growing season that allowed almost continuous cultivation of diverse crops. The advertisements claimed field hands were needed to harvest everything from potatoes and peaches to cotton and carrots.
First, Horace convinced the local farm supply dealer to give him twelve and a half cents on the dollar for the family's 1931 Farmall tractor and attachments, which had never plowed a field nor harvested a crop in five long, thirsty years. Next, he sold the cow, which had gone dry, and the pigs which were almost too lean to butcher because they were nearly starving like everything else from Odessa, Texas, to Holdrege, Nebraska and from central Kansas to the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. The chickens went to his older sister, Iris, and her husband, Ralph, who ran the livery in Texhoma where they'd be able to pick enough bugs out of the hay and manure in the stable to keep them laying eggs for Iris' children. Then Horace rode the family mule into Goodwell, where he traded it, and half of his cash, for a rickety old jalopy to carry them to the Promised Land of Californ-I-A.
The family had spent a week packing for their trip west. Foodstuffs and dry goods had pride of place, then furniture, the few clothes that they owned, and one stubborn old nanny goat that was still giving a little milk for the children. On top of everything, Horace lashed the three mattresses that made the Baxters 'rich' Okies. What could not be loaded up was left behind because there was no one left within a hundred miles who could afford to buy any of it. Then Horace had climbed into the cab of the truck alongside his mother, Eunice, and his teenage wife, Zelda, and his six younger siblings had scrambled atop the mattresses where they would make sure the ropes holding the load in place stayed tight, and they had all set off for Californ-I-A never to return again.
Sloans' Deck
A particularly vicious bump caused Steve's already aching head to bounce off the steel truck bed and rattled his teeth. The clattering and groaning that came from the engine made him wonder if this wasn't the very truck Horace Baxter himself had driven across northern Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, up the treacherous Black Mountains and through the Mojave Desert. He knew seventy years of history should have nothing to do with Tucker Baxter's case, but he couldn't help thinking that things would have been different if his great-great-grandfather had been a luckier man. Still, the boy had a mind of his own, and he was more than just a helpless product of his family's past.
Sloans' Deck
It took Horace Baxter ten weeks to get his family to Bakersfield, California, at the south end of the San Joaquin Valley. He was totally unprepared for signs reading 'OKIES GO HOME!' and 'NO JOBS HERE!' Hundreds of thousands of other bankrupt farmers had traveled west ahead of him, and the jobs that had been advertised back in Goodwell, Texhoma, and the other panhandle towns were gone. Devastated, Horace could do nothing more than build his family a cardboard and scrap metal shack in one of the many 'Okieville' shantytowns that dotted the fertile valley. On those rare occasions when he found work, his day's wage, which could be all of five and a half dollars on a very good day, would be spent on cornmeal and cabbage, and he would pray that it would feed his family until he could find another job.
Conditions in the Okieville were deplorable. The dirt floor of the shack turned to mud when it rained, and the stench of so much humanity living so closely together could be unbearable on hot nights. The lack of running water and sanitation led to frequent outbreaks of disease, and by the end of 1936, two of Horace's younger siblings had died of dysentery and Zelda had miscarried her first child.
A bright spot appeared in 1937 when the Farm Security Administration opened its first relief camps with one-room tin shacks and tents sitting up on wooden pallets. Horace somehow 'acquired' two dozen bushels of plums and sold them to get the money he needed to move his family into the camp. The family earned the dollar a week they needed to stay there by doing maintenance chores around camp. It was no paradise, but with hot showers, flush toilets, and breakfast for the children at a penny a day, it was the best thing they'd seen since they'd left Oklahoma. Sometimes, when they worked in the camp, the family was paid in flour and lard, which would be used to make biscuits for dinner.
Sloans' Deck
The truck hit another bump, and Steve woke up, wondering how he had fallen asleep. He realized he was hungry when his stomach growled so loudly that he tensed in preparation for another beating from Cletus. He had no idea how long he had been lying in the bed of the truck, but his whole right side was numb. As the truck bounced along, he began to hurt more and more. What wasn't numb ached. His head was throbbing and his teeth rattled with every pothole and lump in the road. His neck and shoulders were stiff, and his wrists were sore where they had been handcuffed for no telling how long. Finally, he decided he was hurting enough to change his position and risk further abuse for moving, but he wasn't going to be a fool about it. He would try to make it look like he was simply moving in his sleep.
Steve waited patiently for another bump in the road, and it wasn't long in coming. The truck felt like it was running over a giant washboard. When it bounced, he rolled over onto his stomach and waited to get hit. When no blows or kicks rained down on him, he figured his small deception had been successful, and if not for the gag in his mouth, he would have smiled.
Sloans' Deck
In October, Zelda gave birth to a baby boy, Avery, who was always colicky and difficult and who grew up to be a mean and difficult man who shunned his fellows and lived in a one-room squatter's cabin in the wilderness east of the valley. Avery Baxter's wife, Elyse, was ill tempered and hardheaded, more than a match for her husband. She gave birth to Cletus Baxter on the dirt floor of the cabin because her husband didn't want her bloodying the sheets on their bed. As the eldest of four children, Cletus was beaten often as he was growing up, sometimes for things he'd done wrong, sometimes for things he hadn't done right, and sometimes just for the hell of it. His younger brothers and sister didn't escape their parents' wrath either, and they escaped to the valley as soon as they were old enough to work.
Unlike his brothers and sister, Cletus preferred the solitude of the wilderness. He also felt some sense of obligation to his parents, and stayed on at the cabin caring for them when they became too old and ill to care for themselves. He had married young, and his wife, unable to tolerate the abuse she got from her husband and in-laws, abandoned him when their son Donald was less than a year old. Cletus raised Donald in much the same way he, himself, had been brought up, but times had changed, and parents could no longer beat their children for every little thing. In 1976, Donald's first grade teacher referred him to the school psychologist, and within a week, the youngster had been removed from his father's care.
Sloans' Deck
Steve almost shook his head in wonder, but he remembered Cletus' warning just in time and wryly thought that he would indeed 'mind' the old man, if only to avoid another beating. How a father could abuse his children, and how an abused child could allow the cycle to continue with his own offspring was beyond him. It was a shame that foster care hadn't been the salvation Donald had needed. If the experience had been better for Donald, maybe Tucker Baxter wouldn't be in trouble now.
Sloans' Deck
For Donald Baxter, foster care had been a nightmare of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. In his first four years in the system, he was placed in six different foster homes. His complaints weren't believed, and by the time he was ten, Donald had been labeled a troublemaker and a liar. As he grew up, Donald learned to fight back, and then he really earned his troublemaker reputation by beating up younger foster children. He 'aged out' of the foster care system at eighteen, and by then, he had been through five social workers and almost thirty foster homes. He'd also done some time in a group home for juvenile offenders after he had put one of his younger foster brothers in the hospital.
Not long after his eighteenth birthday, Donald fathered a son, Tucker, to a seventeen-year-old crack addicted prostitute. The relationship didn't last long, but Donald remained a part of his son's life. Just after the little boy's second birthday, his mother had been diagnosed with AIDS, and she was dead before Tucker started school. Donald had managed an uneasy reconciliation with his father, and with support from Cletus, he took the child into his care.
Tucker struggled academically, but under the instruction of caring teachers, he proved to be a more than willing student, and by the time he hit high school at the age of sixteen (two years behind most of his peers) he was well on his way to making something of his life. He was in the special needs program and had been scheduled for an Academic Strategies course that would teach him the study and organizational skills necessary for him to be successful in school. Until he ran afoul of the LAPD homicide division, his guidance counselor had believed that he would not only graduate high school, but also stood a decent chance of getting into college.
Unfortunately, Tucker was subject to bouts of terrible rage, and while Donald and Cletus did their best to provide for him, they each had their own history of violence to contend with and were entirely unequipped to help the boy learn to control his temper. Tucker had a bad habit of fighting, and he had been to court four times in the last two years of middle school for assaulting his classmates. Still, he continued to work hard and managed to keep his grades up.
Sloans' Deck
Steve sighed tiredly as the truck continued to bump and bounce along. He thought he understood a little of what Tucker must have been going through. Growing up, he'd had tantrums like any child, but his loving mother and clever father had usually been able to help him channel his anger into something productive. By the time he was old enough to get into any real trouble, he had learned to vent his wrath in acceptable ways like running and working out. Even when he couldn't redirect his fury, he had never gone as far as Tucker had, but once he was grown and working on the police force, his temper had gotten him into hot water with his captain once or twice. He wondered how much worse things might have been for him if he hadn't grown up with two caring parents who worked hard to guide him in a positive direction. Somehow, he had a feeling that if it weren't for his mom and dad, he would have been able to identify with Tucker Baxter far more than he did already.
Sloans' Deck
Not long after he started at South Gate Senior High School, Tucker became the target of a group of bullies. They very quickly found out that calling him a 'dummy' was all it took to set him off, because he was sensitive about being in the special needs program. The taunting had gotten progressively worse and Tucker had gotten into trouble repeatedly for fighting. When he was caught passing a threatening note to one of his tormentors, a boy named Rico Alonso, he was suspended for ten days, and when he came back to school, the teasing was worse than ever and had escalated to pushing in the halls and stealing his books and homework.
Tucker's teachers knew things were headed for a major confrontation between him and the bullies, and while they did try to intervene and prevent as many altercations as possible, they simply couldn't be everywhere all the time, so problems were inevitable. Though the school was well aware of the situation between Tucker and Rico's clique, no one had any idea how serious it was until Tucker was found looming over the other boy's corpse, spattered in blood, a claw hammer from the wood shop dangling from his hand, just as Tucker had described in his letter.
Sloans' Deck
When the truck finally stopped, Steve nearly cried with relief. Cletus Baxter poked him with the barrel of the hunting rifle, and he struggled gamely to sit up; but with his hands still cuffed behind his back, he found it impossible. He felt the extra weight of Donald when he climbed into the bed of the truck to assist him, and couldn't help but be grateful for the steadying hand that guided him over to the tailgate and down to the ground. The gravel of a driveway crunched under his feet for a few paces, and then he carefully stepped up when Donald told him he had come to the porch stairs. The air cooled as he entered the shade of the building, and the outdoor sounds became muffled as he passed through the door.
Steve strained to hear what was going on around him as he was left to stand alone, the stinking balaclava still covering his face. A strange tinkling noise reached his ears, and he could only wonder what it was. He must have been more exhausted than he thought, because he suddenly lost his balance and had to take several staggering steps to keep from falling.
"Stand still, damn ya," Cletus Baxter growled, and Steve froze as he felt a hard, wide band encircle his left leg and heard it click shut.
Finally, the cuffs were removed, and as he tried to rub the circulation back into his wrists, the balaclava and gag were taken off as well. After several moments of squinting and blinking, Steve was able to make out some details of his surroundings. He was in a dilapidated, one-room log cabin. The bark of the old trees still showed on the walls, and the windows were just holes cut through the logs with shutters to close them against the rain. The floor was filthy and worn smooth, but the wide pale stripes of wood still contrasted with the darker lines of bark from rough-hewn sawmill slabs. Looking down at his leg, he saw an ancient iron shackle around his ankle, fastened in place with a brand new heavy-duty combination lock. A massive chain ran off of it to an iron eye in the wall. It was long enough to give him freedom to move but wouldn't let him reach the door.
As Donald Baxter stared malevolently around the dingy room, Cletus shoved a broom into Steve's hand and said, "Long as you're here, you're gonna make yourself useful. Ya can start by sweepin' the floor. It's been years since I've been out here, and since there's no tellin' how long it'll take your pa to figure out who killed that boy, ya might as well make the place livable."
Dumbfounded, Steve stared at Cletus for several moments, unable to believe that he was going to be held captive as a domestic servant until the Baxters saw fit to either kill him or release him. He must have stood for a moment too long, though, because before he knew it, Cletus jammed the butt of the rifle into his abdomen again, and he fell to his knees gasping for air. At least Cletus had the decency to let him get his breath before threatening him again, but this time, Steve got quickly to his feet and started sweeping the cabin floor.