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where the great man’s teeth had once flashed dazzling smiles to Saigon hookers.
    Maxom awoke screaming, soaring above a sea of rot. The maggots undulated beneath him.

 
     
     
    CHAPTER 2
     
     
     
    Saturday—June 9th
    Chattanooga, Tennessee
    The sky was a burnished gray. Low-slung clouds threatened rain. The noonday sun was an opaque orb of lighter gray and its greatest effect on the weather was to lower the temperature to a manageable seventy-five degrees. Even with the impending storm and chill, the boys were at the lake, cavorting among the pilings of their favorite dock, deeply involved in their game of Marco Polo.
    The community dock lay at the head of a shallow inlet on Chicamauga Reservoir. The inlet was just over two hundred yards long, ending on muddy clay banks where a small sailboat was perennially tied to a short well-maintained dock. Other docks continued around both sides of the water. Great homes boasting five and six bedrooms as well as impeccably well-cared-for lawns reached to the cool water of the lake. The neighborhood was considered affluent by most of Chattanooga, boasting doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and even a state politician.
    The property itself was filled with head high weeds and scattered trash that the boys sometimes unearthed. A thin but well-beaten path descended from the street to the dock area. To the left of the dock was open water and half a mile away across the lake, Hixon, Tennessee could be seen with a like number of houses, similar in style and size. To the dock’s right was a partially submerged stone foundation. Water lapped over the edges and filled it with a dark stagnant murk. It was plain that it had once been a fresh-water swimming pool, something that the rich had once installed to allow their children to enjoy the freedom of the lake while safely penned in by concrete walls. One could imagine chairs and tables once sitting on the now abandoned concrete pad overlooking the pool, affluent parents drinking mint juleps or gin and tonics, while citron torches kept the mosquitoes at bay and a hired lifeguard assured their progeny’s continued existence.
    The dock was a study in the sturdiness of nineteen fifties construction. Posts, double the size of any telephone pole, carried the structure twenty yards out into the water, the dock blocking half the entrance to the inlet. The boards had grayed over the years, assaulted by thousands of feet, the southern sun and the constant moisture. But the construction was still firm. Except for the occasional nail that worked itself out over the years to pierce the foot of a running child, it was safe. The dock was L-shaped, the longer portion six feet wide and running like a wooden path to the large square that was the primary landing for sunbathers and children. This area was a twenty-by-twenty foot platform boasting two old rusty lifeguard chairs and a single moss-covered metal ladder that allowed the boys to climb up and hurl themselves out and over the water from the precarious fifteen-foot high lifeguard seat.
    “Ready or not, here I come you suckers!” yelled Danny, leaping up and out.
    He grabbed his knees, hugged them tightly to his chest and hit the water in a perfect cannonball. He sank deep into the green depths, immediately changing his posture, pulling the blackened mask over his eyes. The mask had been Bergen’s idea who was always the first one to get caught. He’d suspected his friends of cheating, so it was on the first day of summer this year that he’d proudly unveiled his creation—an old diving mask, blackened with several coats of waterproof tape, making the Marco man truly blind.
    Danny drifted up slowly like a frogman from a movie infiltrating an enemy compound. As he surfaced, he listened for giggles, whispered conversation or any tell-tale splashing, but heard only the lapping of the lake’s small waves as they struck the pilings and the sound of a motorboat somewhere off in the