Free The Beltway Assassin by Richard Fox

beyond it. He slid over a ravine and hugged the earth wall. The gas-guzzling engine grew louder.
    Any second now.
    He frowned and took a step away from the wall. He couldn’t see the road or his target. Had the crush wire failed?
    The explosion rattled the last desiccated leaves from the forest and sent the Humvee twenty feet into the air. It rolled in the sky, shedding tires and doors to centripetal force. It crashed to the ground, the axel snapped with the sound of a shattering bone, and it rolled down the slope straight toward Jefferson.
    He looked for an escape, frozen in indecision as the Humvee barreled toward him. Pure instinct drove him against the ravine wall a half second before the Humvee sliced through the place where he’d been standing.
    The Humvee crashed to a halt against a stand of trees. The fractured windshields were covered in blood, a single hand stuck in the steering wheel.
    Jefferson spat and ran back up the slope.
    ****
    Ritter scratched at his ratty field jacket. The thing was a forest-pattern camouflage and looked like the one Osama Bin Laden had worn in more than one of his propaganda videos. Based on the smell of mothballs, Ritter suspected the coat might be a veteran of the Gulf War.
    He glanced over his shoulder at the street corner. Prostitutes meandered on the roadside, smoking cigarettes and trying to keep their exposed legs protected from the cold by fishnet stockings or nothing at all. They stayed warm by standing over a grate venting steam. Men in heavy coats stood nearby, pimps or drug dealers servicing the same intersection.
    There were bad neighborhoods in the world. Ritter had once tracked an Algerian arms dealer to a banliue outside Paris, where the North African drug gangs and Roma smugglers ruled the residents like chattel through fear and violence. Compared to the southeast neighborhood in Washington, DC, that banliue was like Beverly Hills. The murder rate for this neighborhood block area was three times the national average. He wondered whether the district’s strict gun laws kept the rate high, because the innocent couldn’t defend themselves from criminals, or lower than it could have been since fewer guns were available.
    The first drug house they’d investigated had burned down a month ago. The next place, according to Shelton’s police contacts, was still up and running. The target location was two blocks ahead and across an empty lot.
    “You okay out there?” Shelton said through Ritter’s earpiece.
    “I didn’t know you cared,” Ritter said under his breath.
    “You were awful quiet for a second. What’s your emergency phrase?” Shelton said.
    “Help, help. I’m being stabbed?” Ritter said. He passed a liquor store with bars on the windows and a gigantic bouncer at the door, who glared at Ritter as he shuffled by. A pristine white panel van with dark-tinted glass sat on the curb. Ritter used the rearview mirrors to check to see whether anyone was following him. He saw two rail-thin black men moving toward him with purpose.
    “Might have a problem,” Ritter said. He quickened his pace.
    The white van grated against Ritter’s instincts. No one would leave a vehicle like that exposed for long in this neighborhood. Theft or vandalism was assured as soon as the local spotters knew it was unoccupied. Local police wouldn’t come in here with anything less than a platoon squad of officers. Whoever was in that van bothered Ritter more than the two men behind him.
    “Hey, you!” came a voice from behind him, and his threat assessment changed.
    Ritter undid the button on his jacket cuff and grabbed the hilt of the fighting knife on his forearm. He crouched slightly, got off the sidewalk, and stepped into the empty lot. Litter and the detritus of a failing neighborhood were scattered over the frozen dirt.
    “Give me your cash, junkie!” Rough hands grabbed Ritter from behind and slammed him against a wall. The two men, their faces corrupted by addiction, looked