Are you going to be making a printed circuit board for this project? If you are, that opens up a number of options for surface mount mosfets.
Here is one that may work for you:
https://www.fairchildsemi.com/pf/FD/FDN359AN.html
This particular mosfet handles 30V and 2.7A while using a logic level gate. A logic level gate means you can drive it directly from your microcontroller because it doesn't require a 10+ volt gate-source voltage to turn completely on. For instance, this mosfet has an RDS (resistance when turned on) of 0.06 ohms with a gate voltage of 4.5V. That means you will only be dropping about 0.16V when running at your maximum current of 2.6A. If you read the datasheet, you will see that for pulsed current, this mosfet can handle a lot more than 2.6A if the duty cycle is right.
It comes in a SOT-23 package which is small so you can use a lot of them in a tight area. They are also readily available on Digikey.