River City History: Duel with the Red Hawk

With speed and cunning on her side, Tomboy tracked down the Crime Crusader and Gail Porter just minutes ahead of her own father’s hit squad. Some accounts make out Charles Jackson to be a reluctant hitman at best and credit this with his daughter’s ability to get ahead of him. But Janie Jackson’s career in River City for decades after her career as Tomboy might mark a different story. Jackson never revealed the extent of her father’s association with the Red Hawk Gang, nor did she ever reveal the incriminating elements of her father’s activities for the Red Hawk.

With Tomboy’s warnings, the Crime Crusader and Gail were able to outrun the police hit squad without a gunfight. Though Jones was reluctant to trust a young girl, he knew Tomboy also offered him a chance to finally set a trap for the Red Hawk. They set out to lure the Red Hawk’s men into a false feint. Tomboy dressed in a wig, a dress and an over-sized pair of shoes to trick the gangs into thinking they were trailing Gail Porter.

At the same time, Jones and Porter used Tomboy’s knowledge of the Red Hawk’s whereabouts to confront the gang boss. No one exactly knows what happened for certain in the Red Hawk’s penthouse apartment. Porter’s news story says both men took gunshot wounds from one another, but the fight ultimately turned in Red Hawk’s favor as they both struggled to overcome the other. In the end, the Crusader perhaps only saw one way to beat the warrior known as Red Hawk. Both men tumbled from the twentieth story of the building and plummeted to an ignominious death.

River City History: Gail Porter

Gail Porter first rose to fame as a reporter during World War II. With much of the male staff of the paper gone to war, the Daily Star desperately needed new staff. At the age of seventeen, Gail took up her family’s camera and started a career of investigating some of River City’s toughest criminals. Being young and beautiful, she often could use her looks to get into situations others might not. The rest of the time, she mustered her never-ending fearless streak to work her way into even the hairiest situations.

After the war, she faced greater and greater competition from the returning workforce. Despite years of critical success at the Star that continued even into the end of the decade, the boy’s club at the newspaper ultimately worked against her. By 1950, she was back working at the smaller much lower profile Daily Chronicle. While at the Chronicle, she learned of the Red Hawk and his burgeoning criminal enterprise.

Against the orders of her editor in chief Glen Grant, she went into the Red Hawk’s many clubs and hangouts. Hiding her past as a reporter, she fell in with the girls of Red Hawk’s most trusted hitmen. Ultimately she dug up enough dirt to put most of Red Hawk’s empire away for a very long time, but not without exposing her identity to the criminals.

Forced into hiding, Gail Porter knew she would need help if she hoped to escape death at the hands of the Red Hawk and bring his gang to justice. Jonathan Jones became her saving grace. The drunken P.I. was a shadow of his former self, but when he stumbled upon an assassination attempt on Porter, he quickly found his old grace in combat. Seconds after meeting Porter, three men were dead, all at the hands of the Crime Crusader.

Jones found himself on the run with Porter. He initially tried to leave the city with her, but found that every attempt to leave met with more death. Police, traffic workers, firefighters and paramedics were all under the Red Hawk’s purview. Anywhere he turned, Jones risked his own death. Up against a villain with as firm a hold on the city as any of the monsters that tried to rule it in the past, the Crime Crusader found himself running out of options.

With some reluctance, Jones informed Gail they only had option left: they would have to take on the Red Hawk head-on. And the source of their entry into the Red Hawk’s world would be a twelve year old girl.

River City History: The Crime Crusader

Meanwhile, a new face rose to prominence in the city. His name was Jonathan Jones. He first came to the city in the mid-1940s as a G.I. furloughed after taking a slug to the thigh. Though the injury caused no lasting impediments, it caused Jones a great deal of pain in the years after receiving it.

A military police officer, Jones quickly secured a private investigators’ license. Though he participated in the regular day to day activities of a P.I., his focus quickly became the city’s organized crime. He busted a pair of crime rings early in his career, which caused the newspapers to dub him the Crime Crusader. But it wasn’t a name that hung well on his shoulders.

He fell into alcohol for the second half of the 1940s. By the dawn of the new decade, he was barely functional and his business just scraped by, a shamble of its former self. It would take a woman that entered his life to straighten him up and bring him to the attention of the city’s greatest criminal, Red Hawk.