The Beltway Assassin by Richard Fox Page A

ribs punished him with every breath as he made it out to a street with some traffic. Businesses were shuttered behind graffiti-tagged security shutters, the shootings at the drug house prompting curtailed hours. A small knot of homeless men and woman clutched at each other behind a dumpster for protection from the battle, with nowhere else to go.
    Ritter unfastened his pants and stripped them off, revealing his track pants. He put on the paper-thin polyester coat stored in the pants pocket and tossed the pants and his coat to the homeless. He started jogging north, despite the pain in his chest. Only three blocks to the Congress Heights Metro Station.
    His put his earpiece, which had been flapping against his chest, back in place and turned it on.
    “Shelton? Status,” he said. The chest pain from the host of scrapes he’d picked up grew stronger as his adrenaline waned.
    ****
    “Eric? What the hell happened?” Shelton said.
    “Did you get the target? He was heading toward you on a bike,” Ritter said, his voice strained between short breaths.
    “No sign of him. Where are you?” Shelton asked. He’d heard the gunshots and yelled at Ritter and Tony for updates as the fighting continued. His soldier instincts were to run toward the danger; his time as an infantry company commander demanded that he get positive control over the conflict and close in on the enemy through fire and maneuver, but he’d been relegated to sitting in the car, helpless and useless.
    “By that gas station with the tranny hooker we passed,” Ritter said. “Come get me…I’m hurt.”
    Shelton shifted the car into drive and broke into traffic, earning honks and a flurry of colorful metaphors. Fear erupted in his chest like a bucket of cold water thrown against him. Despite his history with Ritter, the man had brought his two kidnapped soldiers back to him, and they were partners in this investigation.
    “How bad?” Shelton asked. He cut around a parked delivery truck and gunned the engine. His engine block cleared the side of the delivery truck, and a bike crashed into the right side of his car. The biker careened off his hood and flopped to the ground.
    Shelton cursed and slammed on the brakes. His foot hovered over the gas as he looked at the distant gas station, where Ritter waited and the biker writhing on the ground. His one-time friend needed him, and so did the injured biker…wearing a tan coat and a dark-red hoodie.
    Shelton got out of the car and rolled the biker onto his back; the bloody mug of Aaron Garcia appeared with a mixture of fear and indignity.
    “Hey, man, you got to pay for my bike,” Garcia slurred.
    “Aaron Garcia, you’re under arrest.” Shelton rolled Garcia back onto his stomach with no amount of gentleness and slapped cuffs onto his wrists. He pushed Garcia into the backseat of the car amid honks and threats from onlookers.
    “You got him?” Ritter asked through the earpiece.
    “Jackpot,” Shelton said.
    “Get him back to…where we met this morning. I can make my own way back, let me make sure I don’t have a tail,” Ritter said.
    “Guys, I’ve got some news,” Tony said. “There was another IED attack near Oakton. Some retired Halliburton executive and his wife are dead. Irene says there’s evidence on the way to TEDAC.”
    Shelton looked at Garcia, lying on his backseat, bleeding onto the leather and cloth. What, if anything, did this junkie know?
    “Get to work on him,” Ritter said. “If he doesn’t talk by the time I catch up, he’s mine.”
    ****
    The only drug dealer to survive the assault was the Hispanic woman who’d wisely opted out of the gun battle by hiding under a desk. A pair of Zike’s men held her against a wall as Zike paced in front of her.
    “You saw him here? Right? Where else would he go?” Zike asked. She hadn’t given him a straight answer since her capture, other than to identify one of the dead as her brother and another as a cousin.
    She answered with a