SKYHAWK & TALON A Graphic Novel for the Mind

by Bill Riling

CHAPTER ONE

Death Valley

VVRRRROOOOOOOMMMM!!!

Clouds of dust billowed behind the silver capped wheels of the black limousine ripping across a desert road. Travelling at highway speed following the faded imprint of a one lane dirt thoroughfare scraped by age across the dry sand surface of Joshua Tree, California. The car rocketed past trees, scrub brush, small dunes and rock formations towards a cabin in the far off where even coyotes refused to tread.

The morning sun was already baking the ground a powdery white. The mountains in the distance appeared in a soupy mirage of rippling waves of heat radiating off the desert floor. Crippled trees, bent and twisted in fractured shapes, offered little shade, seem to purposely keep their distance from one another.

Until at last, the limousine, it's chrome reflecting glints of the ever-rising sun, slowed to a stop next to an old brown Ford pickup truck sporting a dull white camper shell lazily parked in front of a ramshackle cabin. A light breeze of heated air carried the last of the dust cloud away.

A man of large size and top-heavy girth climbed out from the driver’s side and circled the vehicle to the rear passenger door. His gray uniform and cap etched his station in life in stone; a chauffeur. His physique suggested more. Perhaps a body guard. Like a sentry, the man opened the rear door and snapped to razor rigid attention.

Out into the heat of the day stepped the only bright primary color for miles, a pair of red lady's Lou Boutin attached to a set of slim, honey tanned legs. The owner of the pair, a woman in her mid-thirties, wearing a bright scarlet sun dress, with matching head scarf to shield the sun. She rose to her feet and adjusted her sunglasses. Her cherry red lips parted into a knowing smile. Like a model on a catwalk, she crossed the front yard of dirt and dry stone and climbed the three stairs to the dilapidated front porch.

The screen door whined as she swung it open to knock on one of the few remaining glass panels of the main door. Her knuckle bearing a diamond ring rapped the glass with impatient rhythm.

Knock! Knock! Knock!

The woman took a step back and waited for a reply. She leaned forward to rap on the glass again with the same meter. A voice of annoyance came from inside.

"Alright. Alright. I'm coming. What time is it?"

A man in his late forties, on the low side of six foot, wearing a white tank top and a pair of Hanes blue plaid pajama bottoms, opened the door while shielding his bearded face from the early morning sun. His eyes squinted as he tried to make sense of the curvaceous woman standing on his stoop. His morning throat cleared as he spoke in a gravelly voice. "I remember placing an order on Amazon, but not for a hooker."

He lowered his hand as his eyes adjusted to the glare. He continued. "You should be a pair of bright blue Crocs and a package of adult compression socks."

He could see his joke didn't take with the serious face glaring back at him.

"Are you Evan Stryker?" Her voice was as smooth as his was rough.

"Depends. Who is asking?"

"I am Mrs. Rhea Moretti. I am looking for Mr. Evan Stryker."

"Sorry, I don’t know the man. But if someone by that name comes by, I'll be sure to tell him you're looking for him."

He started to close the door. "Now if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go have some breakfast."

Her palm caught the door, and she shoved her way in. "Mr. Stryker, we need to talk."

The man held up his hands as he backed up. "Whoa. I told you I'm not the guy you're looking for and this is breaking and entering."

"Does the name Moretti mean nothing to you?"

"Sweetheart, my whole life has no meaning. Now, once again excuse me, but I'm hungry."

He reached up into a cabinet and pulled out a cereal bowl. He snagged a dirty spoon from the sink and slid both onto the table. Mrs. Moretti continued to speak while she looked through her handbag.

"My husband or should I say ex-husband is Enzo Moretti, of Moretti Construction in Las Vegas? I think you know what his real business is. So, you also would know the danger I face in confronting him." For all she knew the man might be listening to her, but he wasn't acting like it.

He was trying to remain cool while figuring out how this woman even found him. He opened the fridge and grabbed a carton of milk. He shook it testing the weight. Something solid could be heard. He then squeezed open the spout and took a sniff.

"Jesus, this must've expired last times Dallas won the Super Bowl." He tossed the container in a waste can beneath the sink. He sat back down and poured himself a bowl of what he called his "Chocolatey goodness."

The woman started to pull out an object from her purse. "As I was saying, Mr. Stryker I recently divorced Enzo Moretti, and I'd like to engage your services..."

She was interrupted by his fingers snapping and pointing. "Do me a favor, hand me that bottle up there."

On top of the fridge was a brown bottle, it's label facing away. She stopped what she was doing and handed him the liquor.

It was a fresh bottle of Baileys Irish Creme. He twisted the cap and poured some over his cereal. Taking a spoonful of the chocolate puffs floating in the bowl of booze, he raised the spoon in a toast to Mrs. Moretti before shoving it into his mouth. As he crunched away he winked and said with mouthful, "Improvisation."

Her impatience shown as she whipped from her bag what looked like a magazine. She slapped it down onto the table.

FFWWWAAAP!!!

The man stopped chewing and looked at the object before him. It was a comic book. A superhero comic book to be more specific. It was issue number 300 of SKYHAWK AND TALON, circa 1989. The colors were bright, the action showed the two-winged avengers battling THE MAULER, a villain of enormous size and width and apparent strength. The blurb in an electric shock shaped balloon read, "The Death of Sky Hawk!"

He set his spoon back down in the bowl and continued to stare at the periodical while chewing slowly saying nothing. All the while puzzling, “How did she find me?”

Rhea Moretti pulled out the chair opposite and sat down staring deeply into his eyes. "Now, are you or are you not Evan Stryker or should I say Danylo Corvanescu?"

The man picked up the comic and stared at the mag for several silent seconds then looked up. "I think you must be lost." He dropped the magazine back in front of her. "The Comic Con is in San Diego." He went back to eating his improvised breakfast.

"Maybe your memory would be refreshed if I told you my full name. Rhea “CRANE” Moretti. Crane is my maiden name." Rhea could see it had an effect as the next spoonful of chocolate puffs soaked in liquor never made it into his mouth.

She drilled her message home. "My father was Aaron Crane, better known as Sky Hawk. Your adoptive father and crime fighting partner."

The man stood to walk his cereal bowl over to the sink. Setting it in, he began to wash his hands. "I told you, you've got the wrong man. Besides, Sky Hawk and Talon are ancient news. As I understand it, they're both dead."

"Did you not hear me, Mr. Stryker? I am Aaron Crane's daughter. And if you are as I suspect you to be, actually Danylo Corvanescu, it makes us both practically brother and sister. He never told you about me, did he?"

The man washed his hands in silence.

Rhea spoke pointedly. "My mother was Red Star. They had a brief affair when the Berlin Wall came down. I'm the result."

Red Star was a female superhero from the Soviet Union. Like Sky Hawk, she also had the power of flight but she was augmented with a bionic arm that fired red pulses of energy, like a super-charged stun gun. She had disappeared from public life soon after the Soviet collapse.

If he had heard of Red Star, the man said nothing. He did understand millionaire Aaron Crane travelled the world on business so the tale he was being told was possible. He dried his hands on a dirty wash towel and stared out the window through torn curtains of bland fabric.

Mrs. Moretti's voice took a conciliatory tone. "I mean he adopted you didn't he? Made you his son?" She paused then added, "And then his sidekick?"

Sshhhhoooosshhh...

A gentle warm wind blew in from outside. Framed by the window, the man gazed past the tattered wafting curtains to the dry desert landscape as far as his eyes could see, but his mind was moving well beyond the drapes and the desert, deep into his past. A past where, in his recollection, he'd swear he heard the faint sound of a calliope playing an eerie carnival tune.

DOOP-DOOP-DOOPBADOOP-A-DO-DO-DO-DO!

He even believed he could smell the popcorn, the sawdust and the animal droppings. He felt the humid air of the Floridian town in which Ridley's Roadside Circus was camped back in the seventies. These memories coming back were not good, but he couldn't stop the flood as his levee of denial broke. He wasn't experiencing the reverie of some halcyon past. His twisting gut was reminding him of when he was only fifteen, the youngest member of a knife throwing act for the two-bit carnival, Corvanescu’s Flight of Blades.

His father of Romanian descent, Lev Corvanescu was a mean drunkard, trained him for the act through beatings and repetition. His mother, Rita; also a drinker, just not an angry one, merely sought escape from their hellish life through the bottom of a bottle. His younger sister, Anna, lost in a tragic circus accident, was said to be the root of the woe that fruited their family tree.

It all came crashing to an end when his father in that state of inebriation, the kind where one feels all powerful, tied his son to the target wheel for what became the family's final stage act.

AAAAAAAHHHIIIEEEEEEE!!!

His mother had taken a knife to the heart through her back while attempting to untie the young boy from the wheel of death. The father, who after he sobered up, was inconsolable. He hung himself later that same day. The now homeless boy was sent to an orphanage on the other side of the country. It would turn out not to be a jail sentence, but become for a time, a life saver.

The charity home was owned by a millionaire philanthropist Aaron Crane, who happened to be visiting the orphanage the very day Danylo arrived. The multi-millionaire had heard his tale of loss and abuse. A tale that resonated with the tycoon's own history of having been made an orphan at a young age. For he, as a child, witnessed his own parents murdered after a bank robbery had gone from bad to worse and the innocent family was caught in a crossfire. The difference, Aaron Crane was left with a sizable fortune.

That life changing event became the spark that lit the crime fighting fuse in millionaire Aaron Crane's own amazing journey, leading and bank rolling him into becoming Sky Hawk, Central City's guardian angel and super hero crime fighter! And later, adoptive father to orphaned Danylo Corvanescu, who soon after would become his faithful sidekick, Talon.

Together the pair of crime fighters would take on a parade of super villains and various elements of criminality. Duly deputized, they weren't vigilantes, they were a sanctioned vanguard against rising crime an injustice.

POW! BAM! ZOWEEE!!!

It was also a time when merchandise, TV shows and comic books about the pair of winged wonders battling an array of evildoers and villains were all the rage. Though their comic book version provided a much different backstory and identities, it was nonetheless just as compelling.

That was the way their world was until things went South. When the crime fighting game began to change and the playing field tilted. When it became more difficult to tell the good guy from the bad guy. When the whole world seemed to be going mad and weapons became more lethal to a point where mass killings were a daily event.

Sky Hawk himself was killed in broad daylight by the Mauler, right before young Corvanescu’s eyes. It also happened to be the fateful day Talon, Sky Hawk's stalwart sidekick, became wanted for murder and a fugitive on the run under the alias Evan Stryker. The day Danylo Corvanescu, as far as Evan was concerned, also died.

SPUTTER-SPUTTER! PSSSHHT!

The spurting water from the sink's faucet bought the man out of his trance and back to the present. He turned it off and again dried his hands. Forty-nine-year-old Evan Stryker turned from the kitchen window and faced Rhea Crane Moretti. "I'm sorry, I am not the man you're looking for."

"Gregor." She said the name as if it were a command. Rhea snapped her fingers gesturing outside to the looming hulk of a man, her driver. She spoke something in rapid Russian then continued to speak to Stryker as if she were a woman who had run out of options.

"Well, you better be. I'm counting on you to save my daughter, Aaron Crane's granddaughter and for all intents and purposes, your niece."

The screen door springs whined as Gregor entered carrying a metal case slightly bigger than a carry-on bag. He set it between them on the table turning the trigger locks toward the man.

"What's this? Money?" Evan pushed it away.

Rhea slowly slid it forward. "It's not money, but I have that, if that's what you want. This is yours." She tapped the metal case which returned a solid sound.

"And this is his." She then set down a photograph of a very young girl with blonde hair in a Pixie style cut. She was wearing Mickey Mouse ears and a smile that only Disneyland can manufacture.

"Her name is Rebecca. She's my daughter. She's been kidnapped by my husband. Yes, I said kidnapped. I was given sole custody by the courts, and he took her from me. I need your help in bringing her safely home."

Evan Stryker held up the picture. There was no doubt he could see the resemblance in the young girl's eyes and the shape of her chin. She was definitely related to Aaron Crane–Sky Hawk–his father. What made him ill at ease was the realization his adoptive father had never told him that he might possibly have had a lover who gave him both a daughter, who in turn would posthumously, give him a granddaughter.

The fact Sky Hawk had been dead all these years didn't soften the feeling of being lied to or a sense of betrayal. It only cemented a feeling of what else wasn't he told? Presently, because of that lie, Stryker's past has shown up at his front door where he thought no one would ever find him, hiding out in Hell's taint. He didn't like the fact someone found him one bit. “How did you?...”

“Find you? As you learned after father was murdered, his secret identity was lost, and you were not only exposed but blamed for Mauler’s death. To make things worse, you were broke. Your father never spoke to you about finances. Crane Corporation had been on the verge of bankruptcy and went into receivership soon after.”

She sighed deeply. “Because Sky Hawk and Red Star never married I was never officially recognized as his daughter, so I never saw a penny. I was refused a paternity test after the board closed ranks. Some of father's possessions found their way to me. I recently came across several copies of property deeds. The one that stood out was the purchase of several acres of worthless desert property near Joshua Tree. It was transferred from Aaron Crane's name to a Mister Evan Stryker. Guess where I found it.”

Her fingers drummed the metal case.

He looked at the case as her fingers continue to drum a cascading beat.

"Go ahead. Open it." She said.

He glanced at the photo and handed it back. They stared at each other in silence and a growing uncomfortable heat. His arms shot out and both hands clasped the openers. With a double click, the case sprung open. He knew what was going to be inside but opened it anyway.

CLICK-CLICK!

It had been close to thirteen years since he had worn it, so he was surprised it looked brand new. It was the last version of Talon's superhero costume. The one he made before the financial collapse around the time he went rogue soon after Sky Hawk's death, vowing revenge.

Folded beneath the deed was a jet-black wing suit and boots. A bright white graphic "T" crossed the chest and tapered into a knife point. The wings, black with white trim, were folded like an accordion. His anti-grav belt was looped around the inner lid of the case. Mounted in black foam on the lid were four blades, throwing knives of black carbon handles and steel from his family’s knife throwing act during his circus performing days, each hung in separate sheaths. It was a stunning intimidating reboot of his original garb. He had transformed from a traditional golden age teenage sidekick fair of bright colors and cape into the costume of a lethal vengeance seeker.

It also was the last updated costume he wore before quitting crimefighting all those years ago after witnessing his friend, his mentor, and his father, die in a hail of bullets from an assault rifle at the hands of the super villain known as The Mauler. The young sidekick had been helpless to do a thing. Which is why the knife blade soon became and extension of Talon's claw.

THUNK!

Stryker closed the lid and locked the case. "I told you I can't help you. Now please leave."

"Danylo, Evan, Talon, you must help me. There's a reason I divorced Enzo Moretti and a reason he wants sole custody..." Desperation quivered in her voice.

Rhea Moretti seemed to steel herself. She closed her eyes and opened them to reach for the bottle of Bailey's still on the table. She took a deep swig and swallowed. It did not look like it was a pleasant experience.

She looked directly into Stryker’s eyes without blinking. "Enzo Moretti has been sexually molesting my daughter."

Evan froze, disbelieving what he just heard. He thought, “The top Mafiosi in Nevada and most of the West Coast was doing what with his own daughter?” He reached for the bottle. "If what you say is true, why are you coming to me? Why are you looking for this Talon? Shouldn't you be going to the police or the FBI?" He punctuated his question with a gulp from the bottle.

"Talon. We both know you're Talon, right? As a super hero you have a simple idea of what power is. The ability to fly, super strength, invisibility, shape shifting, X-Ray vision, bionics and half a dozen other tropes."

She reached over and took his hand in hers like a mother talking to a son. "They pale to what real power is. I’m speaking of monetary, data driven, political and ruthless power where the government is owned, justice is blind, and the people are bought and sold like sheep in a slaughterhouse auction."

She released his hand and leaned back in her chair. "My husband wields such power. He is untouchable."

"Why me? Why don't you use Boris over there?” Stryker pointed to her chauffeur.

"Gregor is the son of Red Star. He is my half-brother. Despite the fact he is completely loyal to me, he would be instantly recognized by my husband's security team."

"Again, why me? I'm forty-nine years old, completely out of shape. Haven't flown in over a decade, the last knife I used was to cut a slice off a block of cheese. I don't even think that flight suit would fit anymore."

Rhea sensed an opening. "We have a two-week window. I heard my husband's thinking of moving back to the old country to raise our daughter there. Once she leaves the states, she'll be gone forever."

Rhea turned and pointed to Gregor. "That leaves us one week where my brother can help you train, make sure your costume fits and the anti-grav belt is operational."

She leaned and took Evan's hand again. "Leaving us a couple days to go over the layout of my husband's compound and set a retrieval plan."

Her blue eyes were penetrating, her deep red lipstick made her incredibly alluring. Evan looked troubled. He could feel the song of super hero adventure beginning to play in his mind like a theme from a different century. His instincts were telling him to say no. But when he looked at the picture of Rebecca he knew there was no way he could refuse.

He surrendered. “I’ll need you to pick up a few things for me first. I’ll make a list.”

Rhea glanced back at Gregor and smiled then turned to Stryker. “Whatever you need.”

Kssh-Chik! Kssh-Chik! Kssh-Chik!

Outside in the desert heat, a telephoto lens zoomed in from hundreds of yards away onto the old cabin’s kitchen window. The camera shutter clicked open and shut in an eye blink as the images of Rhea Moretti and Evan Stryker were being digitized.

A man, dressed like a soldier of fortune, lowered his camera. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead from the desert sun. He lay prone behind a small dune and rock formation. Behind him next to one of the warped trees was a motorcycle leaning on it’s stand. The man smiled. “It’s been a long time, Talon. But I got you now.” The man rose, lifted his bike, and banked away from the cabin until he felt the distance safe enough to start the engine. He then rode off to prepare his next move.

NEXT TIME:

CHAPTER TWO

Something to live for!