The Detective and Her Bachelor

Chapter 1

Being a human lie detector had its perks. Especially when you needed cash, and you knew a bunch of morons that were addicted to poker.

The key to catching a liar boiled down to two things. Letting the liar talk themselves into a hole while you stared them down with an unreadable expression, and understanding body language, and tone. It was more about watching instead of calling someone out. You just had to sit and observe their stress levels while slowly eating a piece of popcorn, letting them wonder what you were thinking.

Sure there were more details needed to catch liars, like how disarming someone with kindness worked better than aggression. And how asking unexpected questions tended to throw off the liar, making it difficult for them to think of an instant plausible response. But it simply came down to giving liars the tools they needed to dig their own graves while you watched. It was a blessing and a curse. An instinct and skill that didn't have an off switch.

And I used those skills every Wednesday night without fail. Wednesday nights were the good nights. They were the nights I allowed myself to feel my age. To sit in a bar as my twenty-four-year-old self, drink, eat popcorn shrimp, and play poker. My own pocket of heaven.

It was the night when I wasn't out looking through people's lives in search of the truth under layers of lies because someone was paying me to. Or trying to understand math— that had changed yet again, forcing me to relearn it all just so I could re-explain it to my kid sister so she wouldn't bomb her next Algebra test. 

On Wednesday nights, I wasn't a detective or a guardian, I was just a girl, who kicked ass at poker. "Stop stalling Delle," Parker barked, narrowing his eyes at me in what he believed was an intimidating glare. The look came off more like an elderly pug sporting a pair of glasses, but I got the message.

Parker, the sixty-year-old bar fly, hated my pauses. How I scanned our table of regulars, snatching up their vocal inflections, physical tells, nervous ticks, and processed them all, before deciding whether to raise the stakes or fold. 

The tiny bar consisted of three worn tables, a long cherrywood bar, and worn brick walls that held newspaper clippings that had mostly faded, leaving people to wonder what snapshots into the past were slowly being erased one day at a time. The jukebox in the corner didn't own songs produced after 1995, and seemed partial to Frank Sinatra, adding a level of class to the otherwise dingy, yet cozy place I had come to call home. 

The bar was was mostly empty on Wednesday nights, leaving the regulars to take up their usual seats without protest.

I shot the grumbling man a hard grin. "Afraid, Parker?" I asked, my tone clipped, offering a challenging eyebrow raise. I would not be rushed. Not by Pug Man Parker, or the other members of the Worn and Wrinkled Wednesday Poker Night group sitting around the table. 

They all sighed loudly in unison, irritated. Unlike Parker, the others weren't annoyed at my pause, they were irritated because they were down to their last dollars. Their small dragon hordes now mine, sitting before their new dragon queen like an easily conquered town. 

I glanced at Richard, who resembled a grumpy English Bulldog, a long cigar hanging precariously out of his lips as he mumbled something about pension money. "You really should stop smoking those," I muttered, waving my hand through the air to clear the smoke.

"'elps me think," he growled. "Stop tryin' ta read my face and just fold. Yer cards can't possibly be better than mine."

The other men, who all sported wrinkled dog qualities of their own, chuckled, making no move to hide their feelings on whose side of the game they were on. They had lost to me plenty of times and were itching to watch either Bulldog Richard or Pug Man Parker take me out. Psh. Sore losers.