Slain Officer, Wife Talked of the Danger : Family: Her husband knew risk involved in taking up badge and gun, Mary Dallies recalls.

Officer Howard E. Dallies Jr. and his wife, Irvine police dispatcher Mary A. Dallies, had discussed the danger of their profession.

They first spoke of the horror three years ago, when Fullerton narcotics officer Tommy de la Rosa--a friend of Howard Dallies, who also worked the dangerous drug detail--was ambushed during an undercover raid.

“He said life’s too short, I want to do other things,” Mary Dallies, 28, recalled Wednesday in her first public comments since her husband was slain while on duty Tuesday morning. “At that point, when he personally knew somebody who lost their life in this job, the reality really set in that we weren’t invincible.”

Then, just two weeks ago, after two Compton police officers were gunned down during a routine traffic stop, they talked of the danger again.

“He said that it was senseless, that it can happen to anybody,” Mary Dallies remembered, unable to stop the tears as she spoke. “He knew you put the badge on, you put the gun on--it’s a risk, you take that risk. . . . He knew that was what he was doing. It’s a scary job but somebody’s got to do it.”

Despite those conversations, despite the fact that she has worked in police departments since she was an Explorer and then a cadet as a teen-ager, Mary Dallies never considered that it could happen to her.

“I thought about it . . . that scenario . . . what if?” she said as she sat in her parents’ home Wednesday evening, surrounded by flowers, including some from the Compton Police Department. “But I didn’t think that it would be him. I could never bring the scenario to the end where I’d have to be at the point where I am.”

With her mother and Dallies’ closest co-workers beside her, and her two young sons flitting in and out from another room, Mary Dallies lovingly remembered the man she married in 1985, a year after they met on the graveyard shift at the Garden Grove Police Department.

Smiling, she told of his adoration for computers, his habit of leaving kitchen cupboards open after rummaging through them, his off-duty uniform of jeans, T-shirts and Reeboks. Sobbing, she shared their sweetest secret: taping 16 cents (a penny for your thoughts, a nickel for your kiss, a dime if you tell me that you love me) to the refrigerator, and sending code messages with the number “16” on each other’s pagers.

Monday night at 7:30, the couple spoke to each other for the last time.

“I told him to have a good night and said, ‘Remember--’ and he said, ‘I love you, too,’ and I said, ‘I love you,’ ” Mary Dallies relived that telephone conversation. “I know that he knows--it makes it a little easier.”

Though both grew up in Garden Grove and decided early to devote their lives to law enforcement, the couple did not meet until they were adults. Attraction was instantaneous, Mary Dallies said, but both had been married before and were cautious about dating a co-worker.

Neither was sure the other would show for their first date, breakfast at Hof’s Hut at shift’s end.

But the same music moved them, and they fantasized of moving to Utah or Arizona, where the air is clear. With sons Christopher, 7, and Scott, 4, they spoke of a safer future. When the boys said they hoped to grow up and do police work like their parents, Howard Dallies said, “ ‘No, grow up and be a doctor,’ ” his wife recalled.

“He was very realistic. He knew that life is short,” Mary Dallies said. “His concern was that he do as much as he could for us and for the kids, and that we do things together because all you take with you is your memories.”

Memories flowed freely Wednesday as fellow officers and friends streamed through the open door of Mary Dallies’ parents’ house all day, bearing bouquets and messages of sympathy from around the state. One call came from Debbie Roulston, who also works as a dispatcher and was married to an Anaheim officer killed while on traffic patrol in 1988.

“It doesn’t make any sense. I know that he was a good man and a goop cop and always did everything right,” Mary Dallies said. “When they catch the suspect, I think that my first and only question would be, ‘Why?’ ”