They realized this when, during the filming of Transformed Tae Kwon Do Teen Terrapins III: Shell Game, a sniper killed the star, D'Artagnan.
D'Artagnan was not the actor's actual name. It was Sammy Bong, an out-of-work chopsocky actor running around the TM backlot in a polyurethane-and-foam-rubber anamatronic Terrapin costume.
D'Artagnan was about to run an evil ninja through with a fencer's sword when his polyurethane shell was split by a steel jacketed bullet and the green of his foam chest turned dark with blood.
The demand note came in the morning mail, while Jeter and Devin were still in shock.
The note said: "We get ten percent. Gross. Or Athos is next."
To add insult to injury, the note was made from words cut out of Terrapin toy ads and pasted onto a sheet of official Terrapin kiddie stationery.
"What do we do?" asked Devin in a sick voice.
"We pay. Next time it could be us."
The trouble was, the note forgot to say whom to pay.
They found Athos with his green throat slit and stuffed into a trash barrel on the backlot that very afternoon, his threetoed webbed feet dangling askew over the sides.
Nicky Kix Stivaletta showed up as the private ambulance was hauling the deceased Terrapin away under the wide unblinking eyes of the surviving Terrapins, Aramis and Porthos.
Nicky Kix stepped out of the work car and sauntered up to Jeter and Devin. He was flanked by two goons in pinstripes.
Devin, quicker on the uptake, hissed to the surviving Terrapins, "Swim for it!"
The Terrapins held their ground. They wanted to defend their honor.
"Or you're both fired," added Jeter.
The dejected terrapins slunk off to safety.
"You get my message?" asked Nicky Kix, rolling a toothpick around his mouth as he pushed the hard words out.
"Why'd you kill Athos? We were going to pay you!" demanded Devin, hot tears streaming down his cheeks.
Nicky Kix shrugged. "I like the smell of roadkill."
"Ten percent?" said Jeter.
"Cash. No checks."
"Can we get a receipt?" Jeter and Devin asked in unison, their incomplete business courses coming into play.
"No," said Nicky Kix in a bored voice.
Dejectedly Jeter and Devin led Nicky Kix and his muscular entourage to their joint office, pushing aside plush Terrapin toys, edging past Terrapin arcade video games and cardboard movie-lobby standees.
Jeter cleared a cardboard box containing breakfast-a pepper-and-onion pizza-from a chair so Nicky Kix could sit down.
"I'll stand," said Nicky Kix, eyeing the stained seat warily. He snapped his fingers impatiently. "Now, pony up. I ain't got all day."
In fact, Nicky Kix Stivaletta was destined not to have more than a minute and thirteen seconds remaining in his entire life.
He got an inkling of this when the office door suddenly banged open, upsetting a three-foot-tall plush Aramis doll.
Nicky's bodyguards whirled, hands going into coats, fingers wrapping around hard steel pistol grips.
Webbed three-fingered hands beat them to the draw.
One pair simply swept in for Sal (Toe Biter) Bugliosi's unprotected ears. He heard a thunderclap that kept his eardrums ringing until three days after his embalming. The air pressure scrambled his brain in its skull cavity and opened every fissure in the protective bone.
The other Terrapin-his purple mask and short stature marked him as Porthos-employed a high kick to break Pauli (Pink Eye) Scanga's pelvis like a soda cracker.
Pauli let go of his half-drawn pistol and grabbed his crotch, which was leaking all manner of body fluids, and tried to claw his lower body back into an erect position.
But his legs simply bent at ankles and knees and he made a messy moist pile where he had stood.
"Aramis!" blurted Jeter.
"Porthos?" gulped Devin.
"Bullshit," snarled Nicky Kix as he drew down on the advancing Terrapins with a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun he whipped out from under his coat.
He hauled back on one trigger.
The blast riddled Aramis. Unfortunately for Nicky Kix, it was the plush Aramis in a corner. It also cracked the arcade game screen and made a cheap plastic Terrapin alarm clock jangle discordantly.
Porthos was wide open, however. Nicky sent a blast of buckshot toward his sappy face.
The blast, however, made a kind of black spiral galaxy pattern in the dropped fiberboard ceiling.
Nicky Kix looked up. He saw the peppery hits. He looked down, where he noticed a green three-fingered hand holding his smoking shotgun barrels at an upward angle.
He was thinking: Where have I seen this shit before? when the shotgun was taken away from him rather harshly, and returned, stock-first, into his abdomen.
Nicky Kix said "Oof" and doubled over, still on his feet.
A spongy green hand grabbed him by his Brylereemed hair and led him over to a microwave parked on a corner table.
"In you go," said a casual male voice.
Nicky thought that he sounded nothing like the real Aramis. He also thought that he was in no danger. Sure, his head was in a microwave oven. But everybody knew they wouldn't work unless the door was closed. And this couldn't happen as long as his neck was in the way.
The male voice asked, "Care to do the honors, Little Father?"
"Normally I do not sully my hands with machines," said a strangely familiar squeaky voice, "but this one is guilty of cruelty to reptiles."