It was a cold night in the dark city, and I was prowling around like a kitten poking at a vacuum cleaner. There’d been a tip that someone in this town was masturbating. Yeah, some galoot was looking at underwear ads and thinking about something other than buying underwear. Some Jasper was thinking impure thoughts, and I, John Ashcroft, Masturbation Detective, would be the one who’d bust it up – unless that’s what he was imagining someone doing. Man, this job was confusing.

A source had told me I’d find clues at the waterfront. But so far, I’d come up goose eggs, as I stalked past the rusted container crates, the collar of my wool overcoat pulled up against the 90-degree heat and 70 percent humidity. Again, I was still working out the nuances of this job.

A midget in an electric golf cart pulled up alongside me. “I hear you’re a shamus,” he said.

“I’m just a guy wearing a heavy overcoat in the middle of summer,” I said. “I’m nothing special, except I’m the attorney general of the United States and God speaks through me.”

“I don’t care if God is speaking, as long as God is paying,” the midget said. “I’ve got a tip that a couple of guys from Oklahoma are running opium and guns through this port at 3:15 a.m. sharp. Worth your while, flatfoot?”

“Sorry, pal,” I said. “I’m a masturbation detective. Ashcroft is the name. I’ll pay top dollar to find anyone who looks at Anne Coulter’s Web page too long. But as far as I’m concerned, guns are protected by the Second Amendment, especially for Oklahomans.”

I walked away and the little guy’s face dropped lower than the standard of living in Ohio during the last three fiscal quarters. Not that I was doing any better myself. I hadn’t busted a bad guy in almost a month. The last time was after I’d seen one too many provocative picture of ladies’ undergarments in a Sears catalogue from the 1980s. The sketch artist responsible turned out to be still alive – an impossibly dried-up old Jasper who still had a thing for corsets. Since then, my take had been sorrier than Clear Channel Communications at an FCC hearing.

Suddenly, one of my operatives radioed in: Someone at the nearby warehouse was online. I crept up close behind a forklift and saw a perpetrator looking at the screen and scratching himself. I could just be that he itched. But what were the odds for a crazy thing like that? I jumped out from the shadows.

“All right, tough guy,” I barked. “Drop it.”

“CLUNK.”

“And the other one.”

“CLUNK.”

Once this clown had dropped the mouse AND the keyboard, SWAT teams had descended from helicopters to take him into custody, making the docks once again a safe place in which the Oklahomans could smuggle their guns and opium.

Yet I knew my job was not done. Somewhere, somehow, someone was masturbating. I knew it because, no matter how many times I showered or how hard I scrubbed, I always felt dirty. Dirty, dirty, dirty.