Free Wild Rider (Bad Boy Bikers Book 2) by Lydia Pax

attempts at trying to foist off the decisions onto some mythical third party who would swoop in on a Griffin of Knowledge and deliver fair judgments swinging away with the Sword of Truth.
    But then Beretta said, “Yeah. Steal their fucking money? Yes. That's exactly what we could do. We could make it happen in...” he thought for a moment, “ I don't know, two, three days?”
    Oh, god. God .
    Her heart pounded as quick and as sure as if he had kissed her for an hour. Just deciding that—just like that! No debate. No hours of back-and-forth. Just a decision and it was done. On to the next task.
    Once, her family had spent a year mulling over the purchase of a new kitchen table. Then, when it arrived and the color wasn’t right, they spent another six months mulling over whether it actually clashed with the decor enough to send it back to the manufacturer for a fix.
    She wasn’t used to decisions like this in her public life. As a nurse, she had to make decisions all the time; it was part of what drew her to the job. She couldn’t hesitate—but then, there also weren’t a lot of judgment calls for a nurse like her. She followed the orders of doctors and acted according to protocols. Sometimes she had stress attacks about being a doctor—deciding which organ to cut into, what diagnosis to give.
    Her job was occasionally suggesting these things, informing doctors and other nurses about her thoughts and intuitions, but never did she ever have to decide the fate of someone else’s life for them without a mountain of medical evidence and standard procedure to back up her decision.
    Tank nodded. “They've got a point, boss. Ain’t nobody carries change in this town around like the Copperheads.”
    “The amount of traffic they do? I bet they’ve got four, maybe five stashes in the city,” said Locke. “I can go searching around, suss up some leads.”
    “Suss up some whores, you mean,” said Tank.
    Locke smiled. “Leads are leads.”
    Ace paced from end of the room to the other, knocking his hand against the television and the dresser and the wall in arrhythmic time.
    “Could hit a shipment, yeah...” He half-muttered, tossing his head this way and that. “...have to bring a lot of guns, though...”
    “Ivan might help us out,” said Locke. “If you really trust him.”
    “I don’t trust him enough to tell him everything,” said Ace. “Nothing about the Cartel. But if we pay him, he’ll be on the spot for us.”
    “But how are we gonna find the stashes?” said Tank. “Not that I don’t trust pretty boy, there, but that’s a gamble.”
    “Just pick a man up,” said Beretta. He pointed at Helen. “She can make him talk.”
    Already, she had retreated out of the conversation, content that she had said her piece—ill-advised though it was—and rather amazed that the four of them, especially Beretta, had seemed to glom onto it as some good idea. It had appeared to her that anything out of a woman’s mouth was automatically discounted with men like these. Maybe not.
    But now Beretta was volunteering her for...
    “I can do the what now?”

Chapter 11
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    B eretta turned his bike off, taking an uneasy look around the dark parking lot. There were lights on, but they only shined down directly beneath themselves. The dark pushed in on the light, keeping it from the shadowy places in the corners of the buildings and the grass. Anyone could be hidden out there.
    “I’m just telling you, we’re taking a risk here.”
    Helen squared her jaw. “Do you want to buy me clothes?”
    He shook his head. “We need all the money we can get right now for the job.”
    “Then I’m going to need to pick some of mine up. Unless you want an old lady who wears nothing but scrubs.”
    They were at her apartment complex, a small gated community called Stockland Springs. There weren't springs in Stockland anymore than there was a rain forest, but that didn't seem to bother the marketers of such a