Free The Beltway Assassin by Richard Fox Page A

at him with wide, jaundiced eyes.
    One poked him in the chest, pressing the finger against Ritter’s pectoral. The other brandished a shank, something that looked like it had been smuggled out of prison: a sharpened hunk of metal with a tapered handle.
    “I’ll fucking cut you!” the other man shouted with more volume than conviction.
    Ritter just smiled at them.
    He unsheathed his combat knife and brought the blade across the man’s body with the same motion. It severed the offending finger with ease. Ritter snapped a kick at the knife wielder and hit him just below the kneecap; the joint popped and sent the man down. Ritter grabbed the man’s head on the way down and slammed it into his rising knee. The knife wielder went limp.
    Ritter turned his attention back to the first man, who was looking at the blood spurting from his exposed knuckle, too shocked to scream. Ritter flipped his knife to a forward grip and stomped a foot.
    “Boo,” he said.
    The nine-fingered man turned and ran; he had no care for his partner or his digit twitching in the dirt.
    “Ritter, what’s going on?” Shelton said through the earpiece.
    “Nothing,” Ritter said. He looked at the white van; he could make out figures behind the tinted glass in the front two seats. Neither seemed interested in the fight they had witnessed. Ritter memorized the license plate number and cut across the lot. The meth house, a three-story cinderblock building with broken windows, lay on the other side of the wooden fence.
    The smell hit him first, a vile concoction of flammable vapors. They must be cooking meth on the upper floors , he thought. He squeezed through a gap in the wooden fence and almost stepped in a frothing yellow puddle. A woman, wearing little more than rags, lounged against the building, heedless of the cold or pollution around her.
    “Suck your cock for a hit,” she said.
    “Sometimes I miss Iraq,” Ritter said. He went around the corner and knocked on a door behind a heavy iron gate.
    A peephole slid open. A pair of eyes looked him over, lingering on the fresh blood splatter on his coat.
    “You use here, you buy here,” said the voice from behind the door.
    Ritter nodded, adding facial ticks to his performance.
    “Twenty-dollar entrance fee.”
    Ritter pressed a bill up to the window; deft fingers snatched it away. The smell of cat urine and paint thinner hit him as the doorman let him in. Yellow lights, those that worked, cast feeble light through the building. A counter at the far end of the floor had an impatient-looking Hispanic woman, her hair up in a severe bun and prison-quality tattoos up and down her bare arms. She beckoned Ritter over. Two men, gang tattoos from their wrists to the bases of their chins and long-rifle AK-47s slung over their chests, flanked her.
    “What you want?” she asked. She opened a cigar box, full of baggies of what looked like chunks of soap. “I’ve got clean needles. Oxy in case you need to come down.”
    Ritter pulled a photo of Garcia from a pocket and set it on the counter. “I’m looking for my brother. Is he here?”
    The dealer smacked her lips and looked at Ritter. Ritter put five twenty-dollar bills on the counter. She tapped the bills, and Ritter shelled out three more.
    “Upstairs. He’s been here for a couple of hours. You going to be a problem?” she asked. One of the guards shifted in tune with her question.
    “No, just need to talk to him,” Ritter said. He turned away and brought a hand over his mouth. “You get that?” he mumbled.
    “Roger, I’ll…wait,” Shelton said. “Three squad cars just went by…and a SWAT van. I think you’re going to have company.”
    Ritter hurried up a set of rickety stairs, careful not to touch the handrails with his bare skin. A junkie lay against the railing, a needle dangling from an arm riddled with scabs. The second floor stank worse than the first. Men and women lounged against the walls, their brains floating in a chemical