Chapter 2: THE EMPIRE OF EVIL’S EVIL PLAN

The boardroom in the headquarters building of the Empire of Evil Paintball Company was a testament to the corporation’s vile and ill-gotten success. The walls were carven marble of the finest kind, they’re veined and speckled expanse broken only by floor to ceiling mirrors framed in 24-carat gold.

The boardroom’s table was the size of a football field, (exaggerating only slightly) made entirely of teak illegally ripped out of the heart of the Amazon rain forest. The floor was covered in the finest baby sealskin fur rug, every cub skinned alive before its brains had been bashed out against the ice.

The plush executive chairs placed around the table were upholstered in mottled brown and white puppy dog leather; the carafes and coffee sets spaced every few yards down the length of the table were made from illegally poached elephant tusk ivory.

Lovingly arranged by a top-notch taxidermist (who had disappeared under mysterious circumstances) in display case niches placed in front of each gold-framed mirror along the walls, were stuffed displays of creatures that had ceased to walk the earth or were right now on the very verge of extinction: a polar bear cub, a dodo, a black rhinoceros, a Yangtze river dolphin. They had been arranged as if at the moment of death, and their death’s had not been pretty.

In the center of the table, under a large crystal dome, like some obscene caricature of a floral display made out of fungus and mold, sat a seemingly random pile of checks and bills of varied denomination and origin. Each one represented the first dollar, pound, mark, yen, kroner and shekel that the company had taken from rivals and partners that it had crushed, used up, destroyed or absorbed.

Despite the expensive recessed lighting, the room always remained in a perpetual murk. Despite the absence of cigarette, pipe or cigar, it remained perpetually enshrouded in smoke. Despite a twice daily cleaning and automatically dispensed air-freshening scents, it smelled perpetually of rotten flesh, fermented cabbage and cheese, as if the stuffed animals had been improperly preserved.

Sitting at the head of the table in a throne like chair was the titular head of the EOE, one Louis ‘Louie’ Tanner. Louie didn’t so much sit at the head of the table as squat, like a pimply, warty toad, although any self-respecting warted toad would take exception to that remark.
Louie oozed in his chair like a bucket of night crawlers freshly poured onto a mound of dung and eagerly digging their way in.

Louie reposed like a sated rapist. Louie sat like a fat man on a toilet, finally relieved of a bout of the runs. Louie squelched like a loogie hitting a windshield at ninety miles an hour.
Louis hated being called Louie.

To Mr. Tanner’s right sat two cousins, Saul and Gene Harness. They were from the toad side of the family.

To Mr. Tanner’s left sat two brothers, Sadam and ‘Silly’ Butler. They were from the night crawler side of the family.

Arrayed the rest of the way down the table were various consigliore, retainers, confidants, fixers and hatchet men – and women, among them: Bev Michaels, the trusted ‘buyer’; Beggar Persia the ‘front man’, Greg ‘Aunt Jemima’ Grinder the brown-noser, and others.

At the foot of the table, bathed in shadow and wreathed in smoke sat another figure that no one ever called by name.

“What,” whined Louie in a nasal Brooklyn whine, “Are we going to do about New Jersey?
“It should be a simple thing. My headquarters is IN New Jersey. It’s embarrassing to me. I have to live in New York because I don’t control New Jersey. It’s not cheap to fly back and forth anymore – and I like cheap!”

Silly spoke up. “I think we should sue. Or maybe we should get a patent and then sue. But I definitely think we should sue.”

Louie snorted. “What in god’s name are you going to get a patent on?”

Saddam looked at his older brother to make sure it was okay for him to speak, got the go ahead and said “Well, we’ve been looking into that. No one has a business methodology patent for making, distributing and retailing paintballs. We can put an application in, our friend at the PTO will push it through and in the meantime we can send out see-and-dees to all the fields that aren’t selling our paintballs. We’ll offer them a licensing deal for like one hundred thousand a year and a royalty of, say, five cents per ball, or, they can become one of our distributors and not have to pay anything.”

Louie smiled. He liked the way those brothers thought. “How much is that going to cost us?” he asked.

Silly was always the brother who talked about money. “Not much, say twenty-five hundred for the application, the usual on-going fees and the usual percentage to our guy at the PTO – maybe ten thousand total.”

Louie nodded. Chump change. “Ok. Do it. Now, tell me what happens if they ignore the cease and desist?”

Gene Harness spoke from the other side of the table. “We’ve already started working on that, Louis. Sometime early tomorrow morning, when Performance Paintball opens up, they just might not have any rental gear to rent. They’re probably going to have problems with their compressor and their paintballs are all going to be a little leaky. Or so I’ve heard…

“I’ve got a couple of guys they don’t know heading down there in the morning and they’ll make sure that everyone standing around in the parking lot knows there are other fields not too far away that they can go to. They’ve got a butt load of discount coupons with them too.”

Louis nodded his approval.

Saul then spoke up. “We’re also working on the league to get their team suspended for the rest of the season. The usual stuff, accusations of cheating and game-fixing, ‘proof’ of using illegal technology, that kind of thing. We’re hinting that we’ll pull the company’s sponsorship of the league if they don’t work with us. We’re arm-twisting their sponsors to drop them – but you know how that goes. TJ Sports loves those guys and we don’t do any business with them, and there are a couple of their other supporters that we don’t have a handle on. Especially that guy at CC Gun Works. He’s had a hard-on for us ever since we copied his Silver Spirit gun.

“But,” and a gleam came into Saul’s eye “we’re also working on a couple of their key players. We’re going to offer them nice, juicy contracts to leave the team and, if that happens, we’ve got a couple of ringers all set up to join the ‘Wolves when they start looking for replacements.”

Louis again nodded his approval. “All well and good, well and good.” He looked down the length of the table to the figure enshrouded in shadow and smoke. “What about the zoning board? Are we getting anywhere with the township?”

A rather young sounding voice issued from the murk at the far end of the table. “My father is working on it. The Mayor of that town has a few skeletons he’d rather keep in the closet. I don’t think it will be too difficult for him to make the right choice between a public scandal or a nice little campaign contribution. You handle the paintball crap and let me take care of family business.”

Louis shivered a little bit. Mentioning the family business reminded him of horse heads and bloody sheets. Sure that movie had been Hollywood, but he’d seen and heard enough to know that in this case, while truth might be stranger than fiction, the fiction was pretty darned close to the truth.

Louis looked at his watch. The end of another fruitful day was rapidly drawing to a close. He was eager to knock off a little early so he could get in some quality time with his mistress before he had to head home to the wife. Too bad there wasn’t an event scheduled for this weekend that he and the girlfriend could sneak off to.

“Alright guys. Its getting to the end of the day and you all have some stuff to get in motion. Call me if anything comes up, otherwise, have a great and greedy weekend.”

The EOE board members began gathering their papers together. The nameless one left through his own private door at the far end of the room. Louis relaxed just a little bit more, once the shadowy presence was gone.