title: A Cop's Life: True Stories from the Heart Behind the Badge
author:  Randy Sutton 
description: <i>Starred Review.</i> Veteran Las Vegas police sergeant Sutton, who edited the acclaimed <i>True Blue,</i> brilliantly evokes the tormented inner life of the average cop with 20 short but powerful autobiographical sketches. With a novelist's skill, Sutton makes fresh situations that could, in lesser hands, come across as hoary clichs. The broken lives Sutton encountersthe suicides, gangbangers, the mentally ill, the burnt-out officers tempted to eat their guns and the innocents in the wrong place at the wrong timecome vividly to life. The memorable figures include a boy who attempts to protect the grandmother who cares for him from violent punks, and a young girl whose trust in the cynical Sutton helps him gain perspective on his job. The author doesn't minimize the temptation to respond with force that is often the officer's instinctive response to mindless cruelty, and unflinchingly portrays the stresses that plague him when his best efforts to protect or save lives fell short stresses that led him to consider ending his life. Some may find the closing section, a fictional Christmas parable, slightly sappy, but that doesn't diminish Sutton's achievement in enabling the reader to pound the pavement in his shoes. <i>(July)</i> <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  #### PROLOGUE
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Santa Barbara California,
  
  
  
  
  
  Two years ago.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Officer Kayne Dobrescu pulled into his designated parking space, shut off his
  Titan Sidewinder Softail motorcycle—a holdover from his bachelor days—and let
  out a heavy sigh, staring at the apartment building his family called home.
  
  
  
  
  
  God, he was tired. No, exhausted—mentally, physically, emotionally exhausted.
  He'd just finished the second of back-to-back double shifts, and it had been
  ten days since he'd had a day off. Officers were discouraged from working so
  many hours for safety reasons, but the department had been seriously short-
  staffed lately, and Kayne desperately needed the money. He had a wife and
  three precious children who depended on him for everything.
  
  
  
  
  
  He hated how little time he got to spend with them these days. It seemed like
  he only ever saw them anymore when they were sleeping, and he missed them with
  every fiber of his being. But he was the sole provider, and they depend