8Ball (Yattsu Tama) the Assassin

Word count: 13,421

--Five years ago-Earth: An unidentified man gets a gunshot wound to the skull on top of a burnt out tenement building in Hell’s kitchen, NY. The body was found by police and dubbed another mindless homicide. No identification was found on the body, and fingerprints didn’t show up in any police computer data base. The ‘John Doe’ was tagged by the police Coroner and left in the morgue. Detectives devoted a week on the case, and all leads came up dead ends. One Detective found a homeless man who was sleeping in the alleyway the same night the murder occurred. The Detective brought him down to the morgue to see if the homeless man could identify the ‘John Doe’ resting on the morgue table. The Detective and the homeless man followed the Coroner into the room with all the other bodies underneath white sheets, until they came to toe tag #26, the ‘John Doe’. The slab was covered with a white sheet, but , the body was missing. Days later, the Coroner was still perplexed by the missing body. The Coroner figured he may have mixed up forms and the body might have been sent to the crematory. The Detective wrote it off as another unsolved murder.

---Excerpt from Coroner’s Preliminary Report--- Victim suffered bullet wound to the back of the skull. Powder burns around the point of entry indicate point blank distance. Weapon used could have been 9 mm caliber handgun. No bullet was retrieved from John Doe. Bullet made a clean exit out of left side of forehead. Impact Wound caused Cerebral Hemorrhage, which in some cases, causes the victim’s blood vessels within the eyes to burst. This was the case in John Doe #26. John Doe was non-Caucasian, approximately 5 feet 9 inches in height. Age: 29 Hair: Black. No distinguishing scars or marks. Suggest sending prints to FBI for conclusive I.D.

8B

8Ball thought to himself as he was lying on his back, in the bathroom, on the bathroom floor, in his apartment. "The tiles on this floor are extra cold this morning." It was 9 in the morning and sunlight glared through the bathroom skylight. The light reflected off of the mirror over the porcelain sink sitting to the left of 8Ball, cutting a swath of light across the mid-section of 8Ball’s abdomen. He found himself frequently lying on the tiled bathroom floor, staring up at the skylight. He was always positioned on the floor in a way that looked like he should have a chalk outline around his naked form. He found it very strange. He remembers, as much as he ever does about the past, that he did not die in a bathroom, and he wasn’t naked. He shivered slightly from the cold, but didn’t move from that position. On the days he awoke on the bathroom floor, 8Ball would have the same thought. He’d tilt his head left staring at the smooth, sterilized walls. He’d tilt his head right, eyeing the ivory colored free floating sauna/shower tub next to the toilet. And the same thought would come into his mind, "I really must get a soft fur rug for this floor. Something in black. The white walls and matching tub just don’t have any….depth." He found it strange that he always had that thought. A beeping sound echoed into the bathroom. 8Ball recognized it as his monitor phone, out in the kitchen section of his apartment, embedded in the wall next to the Sonic Wave Insta-chef. ‘Food cooked in a macro second’.