A dark shock of hair rose from behind the linoleum counter, beady eyes peering through thick smudged lenses and out through a gap between the canister of Slim Jims and the plastic carousel displaying a raft of dated and dusty sunglasses. The store was a shithole, and the only thing more dismal than its shoddy appearance was the shoddy state of its finances.
Moriarty's filling station had been family-owned for three generations. In the glory days - like the 1977 Arab oil embargo - the Moriarty family made more in a week than they would spend in a month! When James Moriarty had assumed the reins from his father in the late 1990s after a spell at Fresno Business Academy, he had grand designs for expansion. Within a mere 24 months he had designed, financed and constructed a gleaming mini-mart with shelves laden with Hostess confections, fried and salted meats, and all manner of starchy chips. Tobacco, cold pop, and packaged muffins rounded out the offerings.
Reflecting Moriarty's (also known then as MJ - or Junior) cold brilliance, profits doubled. Gasoline sales increased as customers thronged to the convenience mart for snacks and refreshments. Sales were brisk. But even Moriarty could not have anticipated the financial troubles ahead.
Moriarty's benefitted from zoning laws that grandfathered in his family's filling station and -better yet - the mini-mart, in what was otherwise a residential neighborhood for blocks in either direction. If one needed gas, Twinkies, or both there was only one convenient location to acquire such goods. Junior, having grown up in an environment where his family business benefitted from this advantageous status quo, underestimated the shrewdness of the man who now bore the focus of Junior's unnatural hatred - Sherlock Holmes.
Holmes had worked his way up from fry chef at the city center McDonalds. He had, while preparing dozens of fresh batches of fries per day, did what he did best. He thought. He studied maps of the city in his photographic memory (cut to weird flashing London tube map in Holmes' mind), and was intrigued to see only one neighborhood devoid of fast food (or any) dining establishments, save an old filling station with a mini-mart. Holmes, studying once again the photographic images in his mind, then flipped pages of a city zoning regulations book he had once mistakenly read during a two-minute break when a customer left it. He had intended to read the Times, but by the time he realized that he had picked up other reading materials he was finished, and the volume had been absorbed into his powerful mind. While reviewing these mind-images, Holmes made a startling discovery. There was a simple process for re-zoning residential real estate to commercial space if the block being re-zoned had at least one filling station AND ONE ESTABLISHMENT THAT SERVED BEVERAGES. Thus, the entire block on which Moriarty's filling station stood was now suitable for building fast food or other commercial businesses. Holmes quickly sought investors to open a gleaming McDonald's...
The impact on Moriarty's was immediate and severe. Business was crap.