Hard to Come By

by Laura Kaye

But that didn’t make the way he’d acted okay. The hardest thing about knowing someone grappling with mental illness—besides standing witness to their pain—was that sometimes it was so damn hard to blame the illness and not the person.

  Emilie sat heavily on the edge of her bed. Right now she was having a hard time making the distinction.

  Chapter 3

  As the SUV came to a stop, Marz scanned the woods around where Beckett parked. The narrow dirt road would give them a place to ditch the truck while they scoped out Garza’s sister’s house.

  “Let’s do it,” Marz said, needing to fill the silence. The forty-minute trip from Baltimore to Annapolis was probably the first time he’d been alone with Beckett for more than a few minutes since they’d been sent stateside a year ago. And the whole ride had been quiet as a tomb. In the Army, despite being an odd pairing—Beckett the strong, silent, scary type, and Marz an outgoing chatterbox—the two of them had been tight. More than just friends, they’d been like brothers. Marz had always considered it a major victory when he got the big guy to crack a smile or, God forbid, laugh out loud.

  But the moment the insurgents had thrown that grenade during the ambush, everything had changed. Marz had seen the incoming projectile first, and he’d shoved Beckett out of the way. The explosion had taken them both down, injuring Beckett’s left leg and blowing Marz’s righty clean off below the knee. Since then, it had become clear that act had formed a wall between them, one Beckett wouldn’t let Marz get over or around.

  Beckett turned his head toward Marz. Though dark sunglasses shielded the other man’s gaze, some sort of struggle was clear on Beckett’s face. No doubt he was debating whether or not to ask if Marz was up to this. Granted, walking over uneven surfaces proved a challenge, but that was why Marz had donned the prosthesis with the more responsive—and stable—foot and ankle system. Some men had a suit for every occasion. Marz had a leg for every occasion.

  “We got a problem?” Marz asked as he gripped the handle on the door.

  “Nope,” Beckett said after a long moment.

  “Good,” Marz said.

  They got out of the SUV and met at the rear. From the back, they retrieved packs with surveillance equipment, tracking devices, and other supplies. Silently, they double-checked their equipment and weapons, a habit ingrained from their years of service, and shouldered their packs.

  “Lead the way, hoss,” Marz said.

  With a last glance at his GPS, Beckett guided them down the overgrown dirt road and into the woods.

  Marz chose his path carefully and made out fine. The ground was mostly level and solid, the lack of rain the past few weeks working to his advantage. On alert for any signs of company, they quietly made their way through spots of dense undergrowth interspersed between more open forest.

  Half an hour earlier, they’d driven by Emilie Garza’s property to get a feel for her location. Turned out luck was on their side, because her house was isolated on a narrow point of land that fronted the Chesapeake Bay. They hadn’t been able to see the house from the road, which was why they’d decided to overland it so they could get a good look on their own terms.

  They were close to nailing down Manny Garza. Marz could feel it.

  Ahead through the trees, the house came into view. Beckett signaled with his hand and guided them through the woods to a position where the trees closed in on the far edge of a circular drive. Crouching behind neighboring oaks, they scanned the house and yard.

  Whereas big houses with soaring windows dominated most of the surrounding properties, Emilie Garza’s house was small enough you might’ve called it a bungalow. The yard was almost triangular in shape, narrower where the drive wound down to the road and wider where the grass sloped off toward the water. A white Toyota Camry sat near the front of the house. What the place lacked in grandeur, it made up for in hominess. The blue shutters against the white siding, ferns hanging in pots along the whole expanse of the front porch, and American and Maryland flags flapping gently off poles affixed to the porch columns made it appear the kind of house you called a home. Something he never had.

  Everything was quiet, and it wasn’t yet dark enough to discern lights or movement within.

  Marz slipped the pack off his shoulders and removed a few pieces of equipment as Beckett did the same. One thing they’d always bonded over: gadgets. They both loved to use them, and Beckett had always been particularly good at modifying them. As Beckett powered up an X-ray camera with see-through-the-wall technology, Marz slipped on a pair of headphones that connected to a bionic ear, a handheld listening device that amplified sound from up to a hundred yards away.

  The moment Marz turned on the supersensitive microphone, he picked up the soft strains of music from inside. No voices, but there were other noises. A soft clinking, a low hiss or sizzle—sounds that made him think of cooking. He looked to Beckett, who tilted the screen of the tablet camera toward him. The cutting-edge technology was essentially a radar system that measured changes in WiFi wave frequency through walls as thick as one foot. The screen revealed one disturbance to those waves.

  One person inside.

  Marz nodded to Beckett.

  “Oh, my God, that’s good,” came a woman’s voice through Marz’s headphones. His gaze returned to the house and scanned from window to window as he imagined what Emilie Garza was doing. Sounds like doors or cabinets opening and closing. The clinks of plates and glasses. The scrape of a chair against the floor. “Oh, forgot the jalapeños,” she murmured.

  She apparently had a habit of talking to herself, as it continued throughout the whole meal until the rushing sound of water suggested she was doing the dishes. And then it got quiet again.

  A cool darkness had fallen over the peaceful yard. Lights illuminated the front porch and glowed from the water side of the house.

  Marz’s thighs were pitching a fit about kneeling, so he carefully readjusted onto his hip. He didn’t even have to look at Beckett to know the guy’s eyes tracked his movement.

  “Okay, stop putting it off,” Emilie said in a soft voice.

  And then music to Marz’s ears—the tones of a phone dialing. Finally, something he could work with. He closed his eyes as they sounded out and immediately translated them to numbers. He pulled out his cell and texted Charlie: Look up 703-555-2496. When he was done, he put his hand up to his own ear to signal to Beckett that Emilie was making a call.

  A moment later, he received back: Will do.

  From inside, one ring, then another, and another. “Hi, you’ve reached—” Click.

  Damnit. No conversation and not even a name from the message. At least Charlie could trace the number. Marz made a cut signal across his neck, and Beckett nodded his understanding.

  More time passed. Nothing glamorous about surveillance. Most of the time it was a whole lotta sitting around hoping something informative would happen while you fought to keep your mind focused and your eyes and ears sharp.

  Numbness radiated from his right hip and crawled down his thigh, and Marz shifted again. Having lost a leg wasn’t all bad. His leg might be weaker, but at least it no longer mattered when one half of a pair of socks went AWOL in the dryer.

  Silver linings, man. He’d always looked for them. Because, really, what choice was there? To wallow in life’s hard knocks and give up? He’d have been down and out at the age of five if that’d been his approach. Fuck that.

  It wasn’t that Marz didn’t think losing a leg sucked ass. It totally did. For a time, it had shredded his psyche, his soul, his sense of self. And it definitely changed his life—like right now, when the squeeze of the sleeve, pressure on the stump, and weaker muscle tone of his thigh made it harder to hold his position. But at least he still had a life. Seven of his best friends—his brothers—no longer had that privilege. In his thoughts and the ink on his body, he included the Colonel in that number, because once Frank Merritt had almost been like the father Marz had never known. That counted for something, even if Me
rritt had thrown it all away.

  Anger and disappointment weighed on Marz’s chest as it always did when he thought about what Merritt had done. Marz couldn’t understand how their commander could’ve cared so little for his team when each of them would’ve laid their lives down for the man in a heartbeat. Sometimes, Merritt’s betrayal felt a whole lot like being discarded by his parents all over again.

  He blew out a long breath.

  Still, any way Marz sliced and diced it, he’d been one of the lucky SOBs. So he’d found a way to screwing his head on straight about his leg. He hadn’t yet achieved the same level of Zen about his fallen friends. Probably never would.

  But some justice would go a long way toward helping. And his gut told him Garza was key to a shot at that.

  Finally, timers shut out the front lights around eleven, and the inside went dark just before midnight. Beckett’s camera confirmed that Emilie was asleep by showing her in one nonmoving position.

  “Ready?” Beckett asked, rising to his feet.

  “Let’s do it,” Marz said, using the tree to steady himself as he got up, a helluva lot less gracefully than his friend. And damn if he didn’t feel the impact of every single minute of sitting on the ground in the joints and muscles of his lower half. Pins and needles were like fire in his right leg. It was entirely possible that an eighty-five-year-old had temporarily inhabited his thirty-four-year-old body.

  “Okay?” Beckett asked, half looking like he wanted to help but not sure if he should.

  “Good as gold,” Marz said, gritting his teeth as he put his weight on his stump. “Let’s go.”

  They took off at a low run across the yard, Beckett toward the side of the house and Marz toward the Toyota. Well, Marz sorta hobbled. But under the cover of darkness, it hardly mattered. He’d still get the job done. While Beckett hard wired a listening device onto the exterior landline to the telephone, Marz planted a tracking device connected to an app on his phone under the rear bumper of the car.

  If this wasn’t enough to get what they needed, Marz might have to find a way to get hold of Emilie’s cell phone. Do a quick install of some spyware and bam! One-stop shopping for pretty much any kind of surveillance he could want as long as the phone remained on. Hopefully, they could get what they needed without having to go that route. They were already dancing pretty far on the wrong side of the law.

  Marz met Beckett back in the shadows of the tree line within two minutes, where they settled in for the night. They kept watch together for another hour, and then they took turns sleeping and standing watch until day broke five hours later.

  When morning came, Marz was almost disappointed. Not that he’d expected Garza to drive up to his sister’s house, hold his arms out, and say, “Here I am!” But they needed intel on the guy, and Emilie Garza was the most direct route to it. And they didn’t have time to be patient.

  Beckett shifted and his eyes opened, immediately alert and awake. “Hey,” he said to Marz.

  “Hey. She’s up but otherwise it’s quiet,” Marz said, nodding toward the house. “Also, Charlie texted. That phone number was Garza’s mother’s house over in Northern Virginia.”

  “Which we already had,” Beckett said gruffly.

  The guy sounded as frustrated as Marz had felt when the message came through. “Yep.”

  “My gut’s telling me waiting for a call or visit from Garza is gonna take too long,” Beckett said.

  Marz sighed. “I was thinking the same thing.”

  Beckett took a long pull from a 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 her house 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 up with 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 Annapolis until crossing a wide bridge dumped them into the old colonial town. Minutes later, she turned into a lot on what looked like a small college campus. Marz hopped out so they wouldn’t lose track of her while Beckett found a place to park.

  A low brick wall ran around the campus. On his phone’s map app, the buildings appeared to fill several city blocks. Marz followed a sidewalk into the quad just in time to see a brown-haired woman in a flowing yellow dress leave the white Camry and make her way across the parking lot toward a big red-brick mansion.

  So that’s Emilie Garza, he thought as she jogged up onto the wide porc
h and disappeared inside.

  He got close enough to read the sign in front of the house, which identified it as a student health and counseling center. Made sense. The research they’d done on Emilie Garza before traveling here yesterday identified her as a psychologist.

  Footsteps sounded, and Marz turned to see Beckett coming up behind him. The pack over his shoulder might’ve almost allowed him to blend in as a student, if he wasn’t so fucking big. And scary.

  “Where’d she go?” Beckett asked, those blue eyes making a sweep of the area.

  “Student health center over there.” He pointed to the mansion. “Let’s find a spot to set up.”

  Big, sprawling magnolia trees surrounded the other three sides of her building, providing them some cover to get closer. Their part of the campus was relatively quiet, so they had that working for them, too. Marz pulled up the college’s website to find Emilie’s office location. “Bingo,” he said. “She’s on the first floor.”

  “Use the ear to identify which office?” Beckett said.

  “Yup.” Marz slipped the headphones on and directed the microphone toward the building. A mix of voices, ambient noises, and other sounds filled his ears, but nothing sounded like the voice he’d listened to the night before. Maybe too many voices to discern hers from the cacophony?

  Finally, on the far side of the building, he heard a woman’s voice say, “Emilie, your nine o’clock is here,” along with Emilie’s answering instruction to send him in.

  “I got her,” Marz said. “Right through the trees there.” They didn’t have a view, but the bionic ear confirmed that she spent her morning counseling a string of patients. In the parts Marz listened to, Emilie Garza proved herself kind and thoughtful and smart, challenging people to push through their fears, backing off when she’d gone as far as she could take them, and building her patients up in a way that sparked a kernel of admiration in Marz’s chest. An odd feeling for someone he’d never met.

  Especially someone who could be actively involved with her brother’s illegal activities.