Pool_1

case of his coming from Mercy was placed on the tail end of her list, her very very long list. "I don't know... maybe two or three in the morning?" to his pleading question of when, capped by, "if you're lucky." "No good. Lissa. No good. Please. Do me a favor. We still have a full twenty room complement of day crew here, just finishing up. There will be seven empty rooms in about, what would you say, thirty minutes or so?" She corrected that there were already two finished rooms and recited her estimates of closing for the rest. It sounded more exact but wasn't much different from the original assertion of seven empty in thirty minutes. Macaluso reiterated, pressing his foreboding distress, urging, using words like preparedness, alert, vigilance, service, and unfortunately, the lethal word - probable. Probably wasn't the same as absolutely positively. But then, to him, what ever was absolute in medicine? That the expected patient might have an emergency as opposed to being merely a complex problem to resolve, just didn't cut it. "Too fucking bad, doc. You're here on the list.." with a menacing point to the bottom. That meant the middle of the night, many hours away. Macaluso, in turn, just pled his case again, over and over with increasing emphasis and volume. His central theme was the need, the duty, to keep one of the closing room's day team in place until the Mercy child arrives. If it turned out that it wasn't red hot as a true emergency, then the team could go home and the kid put in the cue. But he had hot buttons and nurse Tawney thrilled in pressing them. The hottest two were that nurses get tired at the end of the day and the other - the killer - overtime. Money. Melissa was just too stupid to keep that, the real issue, the only issue, behind the dense curtain of bureaucratic bullshit. Long waits were about relative costs of hiring additional staff with employee