Immigration

Immigration
by Matthew Zathe Daniels

They make a special hell for businessmen as conniving as Jim Barton.  Jim was a restless entrepreneur who had more money than he knew what to do with.  His three adult children never talked to him and his ex-wife hated him more than any human being alive.  It didn’t stop her, however, from living off his money and fancying herself to be “his girl.”  Jim had set up and closed hundreds of illicit business deals throughout a dozen Latin American countries over the course of a career, but was starting to lose his edge.
Toward the end of his last deal, in San Ramon, he wasn’t even sure how he had made it out alive.  Only a few details of that three month stretch of his life were clear to him.   He had been in San Ramon, had been back in New York, and was now in Montevideo, but not sure of much else.  He was getting out of the game, disappearing into a South American landscape where stability was the order of the day.  As he sat in the Uruguayan immigration office with his “modified” papers, he hoped the fog would soon lift, giving him back those missing months of his life.
He remembered only that the stress of the work had been wearing on him.  He never really understood Read more »