Double Sid

By David Kesting

Presented in a single volume for the first time are two updated and revised Sid Ericson short-read thrillers for your reading pleasure.

FILM CLIPS

An aging spinster.

Old money.

New blackmail.

Private Investigator Sid Ericson is called in to clean up the mess.

VIAL

A courier is robbed of a locked case that was filled with vials of a test vaccine.

Or so the courier had been told.

It was a well paid, off the books, blind pick-up and delivery job.

No peeking.

Private Investigator Sid Ericson is hired to retrieve the case before its contents can be transported out of the country.

Ericson soon discovers that everything isn't always what it appears to be during his search for the missing case.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Kesting
• Release date: Mar 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386760122

Book preview

DOUBLE SID

BY DAVID KESTING

TEXT COPYRIGHT © 2019 DAVID KESTING

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

FILM CLIPS and VIAL were first published in separate editions. Both books have been reedited from their original versions for this double volume.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents, historical or otherwise are the result of the author’s imagination or are being used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FILM CLIPS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

VIAL

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

FILM CLIPS

BY DAVID KESTING

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

This is a revised and reedited version of the novel previous published under the same title.

TEXT COPYRIGHT © 2019 DAVID KESTING

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents, historical or otherwise are the result of the author’s imagination or are being used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author.

CHAPTER 1

I was early for the meeting so I decided to stop for coffee and then walk around the neighborhood to get the lay of the land.

I parked in the tiny lot of a strip mall off First Avenue. Before I’d even closed my car door, an Asian woman shot out of a dry cleaners and gave me a stare.

While staying planted at her front entrance, she pointed to a ‘customers only’ sign tacked onto a light stanchion in the lot.

I flipped out my private investigator’s ID billfold and gave her back a cold stare. There was no badge in the billfold, but the act of showing ID and my pretty face apparently was enough. She beat a hasty retreat back inside of her store.

I jaywalked across the street to a market. It was one of those old fashioned neighborhood markets with their own fresh meat department and a tiny vegetable section.

I grabbed a plastic cup from a stack and poured myself a cup of coffee from a self-serve dispenser near the entrance.

I paid for the coffee and a packet of donuts at a check-out counter within a horseshoe of candy bags, lighters, cell phone chargers, and other small items surrounding my head.

I nodded to a middle aged man, with graying temples across the counter as I lay down some one dollar bills. He returned a verbal greeting in a Middle Eastern accent while making my change.

As-salaam álaykum, I said, as I accepted some coins.

He stiffened, recovered his composure and then tentatively replied, Wa álaykum salaam.

I left the store sipping coffee and munching on donuts. Up the sidewalk, a couple of millennials were allowing their dog to relieve itself on the side wall of another business, which had not yet opened.

Both the man and the woman were too busy to notice, as their faces were glued to smartphone screens.

I tossed the coffee and donuts. My appetite was gone. I continued up First Avenue to Juniper Street. As I turned left onto Juniper, it became West Juniper Street.

I was in an area called Park West, an uptown section of San Diego. Its unofficial borders are Balboa Park to the east, Interstate 5 to the west, Hillcrest to the north, and then downtown San Diego southward.

Old style three story apartment houses, newer and higher condo projects, along with doctor and dentist’s offices, plus full service medical clinics all intermingle on its city blocks.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Park West was known as Bankers Hill. Back then, it was an affluent section of a much smaller San Diego, with houses designed by the likes of Irving Gill and Richard Requa.

Here and there, amongst the modern urban sprawl, stood the remaining examples of those once grand houses. Most had been converted into bed and breakfast hotels. Others became office spaces for likes of law firms, CPA’s and architects.

As I made my way down several more city blocks, the street and sidewalk began to grade downwards at an increasing angle.

Passing a vacant storefront, I detected movement out of the corner of my eye. I stopped out of curiosity and peered through its dirty display windows. Nothing. I shrugged it off and continued walking down West Juniper Street.

The Jefferson House suddenly appeared in view. It was perched on a jagged piece of land, rising above the other structures on its block.

Neither the B&Bs, nor the professionals had yet to claim the property. There was trouble at hand though. The Jefferson House was the destination to meet my next client.

CHAPTER 2

I would have never found the approach to the Jefferson House without the satellite map app on my smartphone.

The property was located near Barnes Court and Washington Drive, two secluded side streets.

Barnes Court appeared first, a sudden opening, off West Juniper St., half way along the block towards the next cross street.

A sign of rusted metal, announcing the entrance to Barnes Court, was tacked on the upper corner of a cinder block retaining wall. There was an arrow next to the name pointing towards a sharp turn just ahead.

A yellow sign next to the name plate, announced that this was not a through street.

Barnes Court was a narrow alley of chipped cement, with high walls on either side. The walls were necessary to buttress the earth from dumping down onto the alley, off a level of land twelve feet above my head, on either side of the lane.

There was barely enough room for a single lane of traffic. I walked down the narrow, closed in alley. After the sharp left turn, I walked a hundred feet or so to the corner of Barnes Court and Washington Drive.

Washington Drive cornered Barnes Court. It drifted northward as a pithy cement surface before turning into a dirt and gravel lane. It soon disappeared all together, choked into invisibility by large patches of thick weeds. 

A commercial airliner suddenly appeared overhead on its landing pattern to Lindbergh Field, nearby to the west.

The plane raced downward at an alarming angle towards the airport’s single runway.

The underside of the fuselage was surprising close to nearby rooftops of buildings. There was an ear splitting noise.

As I followed the downward trajectory of the airliner, I realized that view of the bay from this point was spectacular.

I could only imagine what the area was like one hundred and twenty years ago when the Jefferson House was erected by Tyler Jefferson, the patriarch of the clan.

CHAPTER 3

The Jefferson House rose above me on a wedding cake shaped chunk of land. The lower part was reached using a branch lane off Washington Drive.

It was a gravel road infested with weeds that slanted upwards to another level of the property. The second tier of the wedding cake.

The surrounding land here was overgrown with wild flowers, higher weeds and mounds of rocky soil.

A humming bird appeared suddenly from out of nowhere. It raced from flower to flower, putting itself in hover mode over one petal and then the next.

A gray and white stripped cat strutted down from the opposite direction on the lane, scaring off the humming bird.

The cat stopped to assess me, lost interest, and moved on into some wild shrubbery.

I trekked up to the ridge of this lane and came face to face with a carriage house turned into a two car garage. A servant’s quarters with a small porch was attached to the right side of the garage.

It was a one level building, painted in faded yellows with white trim. Its slanting ‘A’ frame shingle roof was in disrepair.

There was green Mercedes parked in front of the closed double garage doors.

This lower property line was guarded from the next level by a stone wall. A brick staircase rose beyond a waist high iron gate, built into the center section of the wall.

The gate was open, hanging on bent hinges. It was rusted and corroded. I moved open the gate of vertical iron rungs with some effort.

I walked up the brick stairway to the upper level of the Jefferson property. The bricks were chipped and loose under foot as I climbed higher.

I was on top of the wedding cake now. A huge house showed above a high, unkempt hedge.

A decent sized earthquake might cause this wedding cake of land to implode on itself, with the Jefferson House swallowed whole by the earth.

It was one of those large, sprawling houses that would have been called a mansion in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

The green hedge, some twelve feet tall, ran around this upper section of the property, on either side of two black iron gates.

The gates were two thirds as tall as the hedge and met in the middle of a gravel drive.

I took stock of the Jefferson House through the iron gates. A circular tower of red painted brick rose up two stories until it was topped of by a cone shaped roof.

A stained glass window dominated two thirds of the front facing part of the tower.

Some distance behind the turret, a tall, narrow chimney of red brick rose high to the sky.

The remaining two thirds of the structure to right were set back from the tower. This section of the house was three levels of more red painted brick and wood, with a variety of window styles seemingly placed at random on the various floors.

A widow’s walk was built just above, at the southeast corner, interrupting the downward slope of the shingled roof.

There was an enclosed porch jutting around the ground floor. The porch had its own overhanging shingle roof.

A white staircase spread out from the porch as it dropped to the ground. There were brass hand railings on either side.

I walked up to where the high metal gates met in the middle, at the beginning of the weed infested gravel drive. Weeds seemed to be the dominate feature of the Jefferson property.

I saw no access for vehicles or carriages used in the bygone days at the turn of the twentieth century.

Perhaps land erosion had shaped this wedding cake piece of land and in turn, destroyed vehicle access to the top of the property and the main house.

The gravel drive ended at a turn circle in the front of the stairs to the house. A dried up fountain stood in the middle of the circle.

The gates