On Call: An Original Short Story by Michael Palmer Read Free Book Online

busy?”
    This time Peterbee glanced down at her phone bank and shook her head, as though she was no longer betraying whatever promise she had made to Filstrup.
    “Looks like he’s off now.”
    “When the employee of the year awards come up, B.P., I’m nominating you. Such loyalty.”
    “You mean poverty.”
    “That, too. His overall mood?”
    “I would say, maybe, Cat-2.”
    The small staff at the PWO measured the volatile director’s demeanor on the Saffir-Simpson scale used by meteorologists to rate the power of hurricanes.
    “Cat-2 isn’t so bad,” Lou said, mostly to himself. “Blustery but not life threatening.”
    “It won’t stay that way if you go barging in there, Dr. Welcome,” Peterbee admonished.
    Lou blew her a kiss.
    “Never fear,” he said. “I’ve got a Kevlar life preserver on under my shirt.”
    Lou knocked once on Filstrup’s door and opened it. The director’s office, filled with neatly arranged medical textbooks and bound psychiatric journals, was even less cluttered than Lou’s cubicle, a reflection not of the man’s thin calendar, but of his overriding need for order. Fit and trim, wearing his invariable dark blue suit, wrinkle-free white dress shirt, and solid-colored tie—this day some shade of gray—Filstrup shot to his feet, his face reddening by the nanosecond.
    “Leave immediately, Welcome, then knock and wait.”
    “And you’ll beckon me in?”
    “No, I’ll tell you I’m expecting an important call, and you should come back in an hour.”
    Lou pulled back the Aeron chair opposite Filstrup and sat. On the desk to his right was an orderly pile of dictations to review, alongside a stack of client charts. No one could accuse the man of not running a sphincter-tight ship.
    “I haven’t seen you for most of the week, boss, so I thought I’d stop by and find out how business was.”
    “Snideness was never one of your most endearing qualities, Welcome, although I’ll have to admit that it’s not one of your worst, either.”
    “Who’s monitoring all these cases?” Lou asked, gesturing towards the stacks. “Certainly not me.”
    Filstrup looked down, favoring Lou with an unobstructed view of his bald spot, and theatrically signed a form that Lou suspected might be the equivalent in importance of a follow-up survey from the Census Bureau.
    “The Board of Trustees keeps renewing your contract,” Filstrup said, “but they don’t say how I’m supposed to use you.”
    “How about some work?” Lou asked, his tone not quite pleading but close.
    “I’m chomping at the bit.”
    “You have cases to monitor,” Filstrup said.
    “What I have is a handful of doctors who are in terrific, solid recovery,” Lou said. “I’m here to be helpful. I like doing this job, and I’ve never gone this long without getting a new case to monitor. What gives, Walter?”
    “What gives is we have a new hire who’s working full-time, and I’ve got to get him up to speed on what we do around here and the way that we’re supposed do it. You know yourself that the best way to indoctrinate somebody new is to get them huffing and puffing in the field.”
    “Huffing and puffing,” Lou said. “I like the image. Colorful. Asthmatic even.”
    “Wiseass,” Filstrup grumbled.
    “So I’m being punished because I’m not full-time, even though I’ve done more than my share of huffing and puffing?”
    Lou had been part-time with the PWO for five years. Five years before that, he was one of their clients, being monitored for amphetamine and alcohol dependence—the former used to cope with a killer moonlighting schedule, and the latter to come down from the speed. It was Lou’s belief that having battled his own addiction benefited the docs assigned to him. Filstrup, who was hired by the board well after Lou, would not concur.
    “That’s not it at all,” Filstrup said. “You’re working almost full-time in the Eisenhower Memorial emergency room, and twenty hours a week