True Blue: To Protect and Serve - Softcover

Chapter One

THE FALLEN

A SENSELESS ACT

BY RANDY SUTTON

 

Lieutenant, Las Vegas Metropolitan PD, twenty- two years; Princeton Borough PD, New Jersey, ten years.

 

The man who killed Sergeant Henry Prendes did not hate him. He couldn’t have; they had never met prior to the moment the killer dumped three 7.62mm bullets into his chest, leaving Sergeant Prendes lying mortally wounded on the cold concrete walk leading up to a nondescript family home in suburban southwest Las Vegas. "Why?" is always the question in the depressing aftermath. The reply we’ve come to expect answers nothing at all: "It was a senseless act." Can we make sense out of something meaningless? Maybe for the sake of Sergeant Prendes’s memory we should try.

 

2:20 P.M.: A DINER ON CHARLESTON BOULEVARD. I had been having coffee with an old friend, another cop from a neighboring department, when his cell phone rang. He listened for a moment and then his eyes sought mine; I caught the briefest hint of despair before his expression hardened and his jaw set. I felt the clenching in my gut as I set my coffee cup back down on the table and waited for him to finish the call.

 

"Sorry, brother, there’s been a shooting," he said. "It’s one of yours."

 

"How bad? Dead?"

 

He nodded. "Another officer wounded. He’s en route to the hospital."

 

"The suspect?"

 

"Your guys returned fire at the scene. Put him down." My friend’s gaze turned steely, but his knuckles were white where he gripped his coffee mug. "That takes care of that complication."

 

We seemed frozen there for those few seconds, each staring down at the table, distracted, enveloped in the normalcy and fragrant warmth of the small diner. I looked around; everyone was enjoying their meal, their afternoon, their life. In here you could almost imagine that nothing bad ever happened. But it had.

 

"I’ve got to get over to the hospital," I said, standing up. He nodded and grabbed his coat. I threw down a twenty- dollar tip for our two cups of coffee; maybe it was guilt money for sitting snug in a diner while one of my own paid the ultimate price for doing his job.

 

We both stood up and walked outside; he stood at his patrol car door and I stood at mine. I knew what he was waiting for. There are almost four thousand cops in my department, and though I don’t know at least half of them, the question had to be asked.

 

"Did you know who it was?"

 

"They said it was Sergeant Henry Prendes. You know him?"

 

A chill swept through me, and my chest and jaw grew tight.

 

"Yeah, I did."

 

Our eyes met and held for a moment in the manner of old warriors, and then we went our separate ways.

 

ONE HOUR EARLIER: 8336 FEATHER DUSTER way. It was a domestic violence call. Several neighbors had called 911 to report that a man was beating a woman in the front yard with a stick. The woman, they said, was his girlfriend. A few minutes later the girlfriend called in.

 

GIRLFRIEND (screams): He just broke my car window!

 

911 operator: I can’t hear you. What?

 

GIRLFRIEND (sobbing and screaming): Oh! He just broke

 

my car window—

 

911 operator: Are you injured?

 

GIRLFRIEND: Come quick! He’s got a gun!

 

Sergeant Prendes arrived at the residence, three backup units close behind. He was met in the front yard by the tearful girlfriend, her mother, and her brother. The suspect, they told him, a young man in his twenties whom newspapers later described as "an aspiring rap artist," had retreated inside the house. The front door had been left wide open. The officers approached...