The old reverend lay sprawled out on the white blanket like a morbid snow angel. Oddly serene for the scene of a murder; sad and tragic, yeah, but somehow darkly festive too. Maybe it was all that scarlet. And the guy was old - on that rugged, rawboned face, with its harsh planes and tapestry of wrinkles, you could read all the years, the decades, of hard living in a split second. But there was a quiet strength there too, a sense of dignity that not even death and a gaping bullet wound could steal away. Not an ordinary man, not by any means. But that didn't stop him dying a death that was all too ordinary - season's greetings, Hudson City style.
But he wasn't alone. A kid in a hoodie, couldn't have been any older than sixteen, was huddled up against a nearby wall, shivering, not from the cold - he didn't even feel the cold, not now - but from the shock and horror of what he'd just seen. From the anger of allowing it to happen. It was a Christmas he'd never forget. Chances are, you know how it goes: a good man dies, a bad man lives, a newborn vigilante, angry, screaming, is baptised in blood. Old tale, played out a thousand times over. But it has punch. It resonates. And you have to make allowances for the classics.
Nevertheless, this time around it seems somebody got bored with the same old script, demanded a last-minute twist thrown in. So a sharp-eyed observer - not that there any other witnesses that night, sharp-eyed or otherwise - would have noticed the kid was clutching something, staring down at it with the sort of wide eyed disbelief typically reserved for first-time alien encounters. It was a .45 revolver, and it had five bullets chambered. A spent shell casing, still warm, lay in the snow not three feet away. No prizes for guessing where the rest would be found.
The victim was later identified as Reverend Nathan Sutherland. But the kid would discover he'd been better known by another name: Ghost Owl.
Rare newspaper photograph of Ghost Owl c. 1965
Ghost Owl made his big debut on the Hudson crimefighting scene in the summer of 1962 - and he knew how to make an entrance. He hit the
He was getting old, worn down,
slow. His health was failing thanks to rigors of age coupled with a legacy of broken bones and battered organs. But that didn't matter; there was work - so much work - left unfinished and he was simply too damned stubborn to hang up the cape and belt and retire, not without making Hudson City a place
worth retiring in. And after his experiences with Kid Strigid, relinquishing the burden to a younger, brighter star was simply out of the question. So he grit his teeth against the protests and pleas of his aching joints and pressed on - right up until his ignominious end on that fateful Christmas Eve, gunned down in an empty street by a scared and confused teenager.
