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water bottle, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “One thing’s certain. With the attack on the Church Gang the other night, he and his remaining henchmen have to be looking for the culprits.”
    “Meaning us,” Marz said.
    His friend nodded. “Meaning us. No way they don’t want revenge. So the question is, are we gonna let them find us first, or are we going to do whatever it takes to find them first?”
    Marz frowned. “Not even a question.”
    “No, it isn’t,” Beckett said, piercing blue eyes nailing Marz with a stare.
    Looking at Emilie’s house again, Marz’s brain churned on the best way to get what they needed. “Which means we need to step things up.” Beckett nodded, and Marz rubbed his hands over his face. “Let’s follow her this morning. If we’re still not getting anything, then one of us will talk to her. See what we can learn that way. Failing that, we break into herhouse and hope there’s something useful there, or I find a way to grab her cell so I can upload some spyware.”
    “Works for me,” Beckett said, standing and stretching. “Let’s hump back to the truck so we’re ready to go when she leaves.”
    “Roger that.” Marz packed his gear and looked up to find Beckett offering him a hand. Glancing between the guy’s big paw and the hard blue of his eyes, Marz swallowed his pride, clasped Beckett’s hand, and accepted the offer of help. “Thanks,” he said, shaking out the cramp in his thigh and shouldering his pack.
    “Yeah,” Beckett said in a low voice.
    Fifteen minutes later, they were back at the SUV. They loaded their gear into the rear and Beckett grabbed a banana from their supplies as Marz pulled a fresh shirt out of the overnight bag he’d brought. He tugged his shirt over his head, tossed it onto the floor of the open hatch, and grabbed the clean tee.
    “I like the phoenix,” Beckett said.
    Marz looked from Beckett down to his own right shoulder, where a black-and-orange tribal phoenix stretched over the joint, across the top of his chest, and down his right biceps. “Yeah? Thanks. Seemed fitting.”
    Brow furrowed, Beckett gave a nod as he busied himself with something from his bag.
    The phoenix was a newer tattoo among his twenty-four pieces, a fair number of which he’d had done since his amputation. Ink had always been a way of claiming a sense of self and creating identity for him. When you grow up without a family, you don’t have the usual ways of defining who you are. Marz had never been someone’s son or someone’s brother—not by blood, anyway. Bouncing between foster families and group homes, he hadn’t grown upwith particular familial values or traditions the way other people had.
    Underage, he’d used a fake ID to get his very first tattoo, a tribal on the outside of his right calf. Gone now, of course. Ink had taken on renewed significance after being accused of wrongdoing and discharged from the only career—calling, really—Marz had ever known, all on top of losing a part of his body. He’d returned stateside with a pretty badly rattled sense of self. Tattoos had helped Marz nail that back down again and reminded him what was most important.
    His brothers. His honor. And justice.
    Marz tugged the clean shirt over his head and raked his fingers through his hair.
    His cell buzzed and he retrieved it from his pocket. A notification from the tracking app connected to the device he’d planted on her car. “She’s on the move,” he said.
    “Good. Let’s go,” Beckett said, closing the rear hatch. They hopped in the SUV and Beckett backed it up until they found a place to turn around, then they waited for Emilie to pass their location. The tracking device meant they didn’t have to follow her too closely. Then they were back on the narrow roads leading off the peninsula on which she lived.
    With one eye on Beckett’s GPS and the other on Emilie’s car, they followed her along country roads heading toward downtown