After breakfast the next day I called Charles London’s office. He hadn’t come in yet. I gave my name and said I’d call later.

I spent another dime calling Frank Fitzroy at the Eighteenth Precinct. “Scudder,” I said. “Where are they holding Pinell?”

“They had him downtown. Then I think they shunted him out to Rikers Island. Why?”

“I’d like to see him. What are my chances?”

“Not good.”

“You could go out there,” I suggested. “I could just be a fellow officer along for the ride.”

“I don’t know, Matt.”

“You’d get something for your time.”

“That’s not it. Believe me. Thing is, this fucker fell in our laps and I’d hate to see him walk on a technicality. We ring in an unauthorized visitor and his lawyer gets wind of it and gets a wild hair up his ass and it could screw up the whole case. You follow me?”

“It doesn’t seem very likely.”

“Maybe not, but it’s a chance I’m in no rush to take. What do you want from him, anyway?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe I could ask him a question or two for you. Assuming I could get to see him, which I’m not sure I could. His lawyer may have cut off the flow. But if you’ve got a specific question—”

I was in the phone booth in my hotel lobby and someone was knocking on the door. I told Frank to hang on for a second and opened the door a crack. It was Vinnie, the desk man, to tell me I had a call. I asked who it was and he said it was a woman and she hadn’t given her name. I wondered if it was the same one who’d called last night.

I told him to switch it to the house phone and I’d take it in a minute. I uncovered the mouthpiece of the phone I was holding and told Frank I couldn’t think of anything in particular that I wanted to ask Louis Pinell, but that I’d keep his offer in mind. He asked if I was getting anyplace with my investigation.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s hard to tell. I’m putting in the hours.”

“Giving what’s-his-name his money’s worth. London.”

“I suppose so. I have a feeling most of it is wasted motion.”

“It’s always that way, isn’t it? There’s days when I figure I must waste ninety percent of my time. But you have to do that to come up with the ten percent that’s not a waste.”

“That’s a point.”

“Even if you could see Pinell, that’d be part of the wasted ninety percent. Don’t you think?”

“Probably.”

I finished up with him, went over to the desk and picked up the house phone. It was Anita.

She said, “Matt? I just wanted to tell you that the check came.”

“That’s good. I’m sorry it’s not more.”

“It came at a good time.”

I sent money for her and the boys when I had it to send. She never called just to say it had arrived.

I asked how the boys were.

“They’re fine,” she said. “Of course they’re in school now.”

“Of course.”

“I guess it’s been a while since you’ve seen them.”

I felt a little red pinprick of anger. Had she called just to tell me that? Just to push a little guilt button? “I’m on a case,” I said. “Soon as it’s finished, whenever that is, maybe they can come in and we’ll catch a game at the Garden. Or a boxing match.”

“They’d like that.”

“So would I.” I thought of Jan, relieved that her kids were on the other side of the country, relieved she didn’t have to visit them anymore, and guilty over her relief. “I’d like that very much,” I said.

“Matt, the reason I called—”

“Yes?”

“Oh, God,” she said. She sounded sad and tired. “It’s Bandy,” she said.

“Bandy?”

“The dog. You remember Bandy.”

“Of course. What about him?”

“Oh, it’s sad,” she said. “The vet said he ought to be put to sleep. He said there’s really nothing to be done for him at this point.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I suppose if that’s what has to be done—”

“I already had him put to sleep. On Friday.”

“Oh.”

“I guess I thought you would want to know.”

“Poor Bandy,” I said. “He must have been twelve years old.”

“He was fourteen.”

“I didn’t realize he was that old. That’s a long life for a dog.”

“It’s supposed to be the equivalent of ninety-eight for a human being.”

“What was the matter with him?”

“The vet said he just wore out. His kidneys were in bad shape. And he was almost blind. You knew that, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“For the past year or two his eyesight was failing. It was so sad, Matt. The boys sort of lost interest in him. I think that was the saddest part. They loved him when they were younger but they grew up and he got old and they lost interest.” She started to cry. I stood there and held the phone to my ear and didn’t say anything.

She said, “I’m sorry, Matt.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I called you because I wanted to tell somebody and who else could I tell? Do you remember when we got him?”

“I remember.”

“I wanted to call him Bandit because of his facial markings, his mask. You said something about give-a-dog-a-bad-name, but we were already calling him Bandy. So we decided it was short for Bandersnatch.”

“From Alice in Wonderland.”

“The vet said he didn’t feel anything. He just went to sleep. He took care of disposing of the body for me.”

“That’s good.”

“He had a good life, don’t you think? And he was a good dog. He was such a clown. He could always break me up.”

She talked for a few more minutes. The conversation just wore out, like the dog. She thanked me again for the check and I said again that I wished it could have been more. I told her to tell the boys I’d be seeing them as soon as I was finished with my current case. She said she’d be sure to tell them. I hung up the phone and went outside.

The sun was screened by clouds and there was a chill wind blowing. Two doors down from the hotel is a bar called McGovern’s. They open early.

I went in. The place was empty except for two old men, one behind the bar, one in front of it. The bartender’s hand trembled slightly as he poured me a double shot of Early Times and backed it up with a glass of water.

I hoisted the glass, wondered at the wisdom of paying an early visit to London’s office with bourbon on my breath, then decided it was a pardonable eccentricity in an unofficial private detective. I thought about poor old Bandy, but of course I wasn’t really thinking about the dog. For me, and probably for Anita, he was one of the few threads that had still linked us. Rather like the marriage, he’d taken his sweet time dying.

I drank the drink and got out of there.

LONDON’S office was on the sixteenth floor of a twenty-eight-story building on Pine Street. I shared the elevator with two men in forest-green work clothing. One carried a clipboard, the other a tool kit. Neither spoke, nor did I.

I felt like a rat in a maze by the time I found London’s office. His name was the first of four lettered on the frosted glass door. Inside, a receptionist with a slight British accent invited me to have a seat, then spoke quietly into a telephone. I looked at a copy of Sports Illustrated until a door opened and Charles London beckoned me into his private office.

It was a fair-sized room, comfortable without being luxurious. There was a view of the harbor from his window, only partially blocked by surrounding buildings. We stood on either side of his desk, and I sensed something in the air between us. For a moment I regretted that bourbon at McGovern’s, then realized it had nothing to do with the screen that seemed to separate us.

“I wish you’d called,” he said. “You’d have been able to save a trip down here.”

“I called and they told me you hadn’t come in yet.”

“I got a message that you would call later.”

“I thought I’d save a call.”

He nodded. His outfit looked the same as he’d worn to Armstrong’s, except that the tie was different. I’m sure the suit and shirt were different, too. He probably had six identical suits, and two drawers of white shirts.

He said, “I’m going to have to ask you to drop the case, Mr. Scudder.”

“Oh?”

“You seem unsurprised.”

“I picked up the vibration walking in here. Why?”

“My reasons aren’t important.”

“They are to me.”

He shrugged. “I made a mistake,” he said. “I sent you on a fool’s errand. It was a waste of money.”

“You already wasted the money. You might as well let me give you something for it. I can’t give it back because I already spent it.”

“I wasn’t expecting a refund.”

“And I didn’t come here to ask for any additional money. So what are you saving by telling me to drop the case?”

The pale blue eyes blinked twice behind the rimless glasses. He asked me if I wouldn’t sit down. I said I was comfortable standing. He remained standing himself.

He said, “I behaved foolishly. Seeking vengeance, retribution. Troubling the waters. Either that man killed her or some other maniac did and there’s probably no way we’ll ever know for sure. I was wrong to set you to work raking up the past and disturbing the present.”

“Is that what I’ve been doing?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Raking up the past and disturbing the present? Maybe that’s a good definition of my role. When did you decide to call me off?”

“That’s not important.”

“Ettinger got to you, didn’t he? It must have been yesterday. Saturday’s a busy day at the store, they sell a lot of tennis rackets. He probably called you last night, didn’t he?” When he hesitated I said, “Go ahead. Tell me it’s not important.”

“It’s not. More to the point, it’s not your business, Mr. Scudder.”

“I got a wake-up call around one thirty last night from the second Mrs. Ettinger. Did she give you a call about the same time?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“She’s got a distinctive voice. I heard it the day before when I called Ettinger at home and she told me he was at the Hicksville store. She called last night to tell me to let the dead stay buried. That seems to be what you want, too.”

“Yes,” he said. “That’s what I want.”

I picked a paperweight from the top of his desk. An inch-long brass label identified it as a piece of petrified wood from the Arizona desert.

“I can understand what Karen Ettinger’s afraid of. Her husband might turn out to be the killer, and that would really turn her world upside down. You’d think a woman in her position would want to know one way or the other. How comfortable could she be from here on in, living with a man she half-suspects of killing his first wife? But people are funny that way. They can push things out of their minds. Whatever happened was years ago and in Brooklyn. And the wench is dead, right? People move and their lives change, so there’s nothing for her to worry about, is there?”

He didn’t say anything. His paperweight had a piece of black felt on its bottom to keep it from scratching his desk. I replaced it, felt-side down.

I said, “You wouldn’t be worried about Ettinger’s world, or his wife’s world. What’s it to you if they get hassled a little? Unless Ettinger had a way to put pressure on you, but I don’t think that’s it. I don’t think you’d be all that easy to push around.”

“Mr. Scudder—”

“It’s something else, but what? Not money, not a physical threat. Oh, hell, I know what it is.”

He avoided my eyes.

“Her reputation. You’re afraid of what I’ll find in the grave with her. Ettinger must have told you she was having an affair. He told me she wasn’t, but I don’t think he’s that deeply committed to the truth. As a matter of fact, it does look as though she was seeing a man. Maybe more than one man. That may go against the grain of your sense of propriety, but it doesn’t weigh too much against the fact that she was murdered. She may have been killed by a lover. She may have been killed by her husband. There are all sorts of possibilities but you don’t want to look at any of them because in the course of it the world might find out that your daughter wasn’t a virgin.”

For a moment I thought he was going to lose his temper. Then something went out of his eyes. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave now,” he said. “I have some calls to make and I have an appointment scheduled in fifteen minutes.”

“I guess Mondays are busy in insurance. Like Saturdays in sporting goods.”

“I’m sorry that you’re embittered. Perhaps later you’ll appreciate my position, but—”

“Oh, I appreciate your position,” I said. “Your daughter was killed for no reason by a madman and you adjusted to that reality. Then you had a new reality to adjust to, and that turned out to mean coming to grips with the possibility that someone had a reason to kill her, and that it might be a good reason.” I shook my head, impatient with myself for talking too much. “I came here to pick up a picture of your daughter,” I said. “I don’t suppose you happened to bring it.”

“Why would you want it?”

“Didn’t I tell you the other day?”

“But you’re off the case now,” he said. He might have been explaining something to a slow child. “I don’t expect a refund, but I want you to discontinue your investigation.”

“You want to fire me.”

“If you’d prefer to put it that way.”

“But you never hired me in the first place. So how can you fire me?”

“Mr. Scudder—”

“When you open up a can of worms you can’t just decide to stuff the worms back in the can. There are a lot of things set in motion and I want to see where they lead. I’m not going to stop now.”

He had an odd look on his face, as though he was a little bit afraid of me. Maybe I’d raised my voice, or looked somehow menacing.

“Relax,” I told him. “I won’t be disturbing the dead. The dead are beyond disturbance. You had a right to ask me to drop the case and I’ve got the right to tell you to go to hell. I’m a private citizen pursuing an unofficial investigation. I could do it more efficiently if I had your help, but I can get along without it.”

“I wish you’d let it go.”

“And I wish you’d back me up. And wishes aren’t horses, not for either of us. I’m sorry this isn’t turning out the way you wanted it to. I tried to tell you that might be the case. I guess you didn’t want to listen.”

ON the way down, the elevator stopped at almost every floor. I went out to the street. It was still overcast, and colder than I remembered it. I walked a block and a half until I found a bar. I had a quick double bourbon and left. A few blocks further along I stopped at another bar and had another drink.

I found a subway, headed for the uptown platform, then changed my mind and waited for a train bound for Brooklyn. I got out at Jay Street and walked up one street and down another and wound up in Boerum Hill. I stopped at a Pentecostal church on Schermerhorn. The bulletin board was full of notices in Spanish. I sat there for a few minutes, hoping things would sort themselves out in my mind, but it didn’t work. I found my thoughts bouncing back and forth among dead things—a dead dog, a dead marriage, a dead woman in her kitchen, a dead trail.

A balding man wearing a sleeveless sweater over a maroon shirt asked me something in Spanish. I suppose he wanted to know if he could help me. I got up and left.

I walked around some more. A curious thing, I thought, was that I felt somehow more committed to the pursuit of Barbara Ettinger’s killer than I had before her father fired me. It was still as hopeless a quest as it had ever been, doubly hopeless now that I wouldn’t even have the cooperation of my client. And yet I seemed to believe what I had said to him about forces having been set in motion. The dead were indeed beyond disturbance, but I had set about disturbing the living and sensed that it would lead somewhere.

I thought of poor old Bandersnatch, always game to chase a stick or go for a walk. He’d bring one of his toys to you to signal his eagerness to play. If you just stood there he’d drop it at your feet, but if you tried to take it away from him he’d set his jaw and hang on grimly.

Maybe I’d learned it from him.

I went to the building on Wyckoff Street. I rang Donald Gilman and Rolfe Waggoner’s bell. They weren’t in. Neither was Judy Fairborn. I walked on past the building where Jan had lived with—what was his name? Edward. Eddie.

I stopped at a bar and had a drink. Just a straight shot of bourbon, not a double. Just a little something, maintenance drinking against the chill in the air.

I decided I was going to see Louis Pinell. For one thing, I’d ask him if he used a different icepick each time he killed. The autopsies hadn’t indicated anything one way or the other. Perhaps forensic medicine isn’t that highly developed yet.

I wondered where he got the icepicks. An icepick struck me as a damned old-fashioned instrument. What would you ever use it for outside of murder? People didn’t have iceboxes any more, didn’t have blocks of ice brought by the iceman. They filled trays with water to make ice cubes, or had a gadget in their refrigerator that produced the cubes automatically.

The refrigerator in Syosset had had an automatic ice maker.

Where did you get an icepick? How much did they cost? I was suddenly full of icepick questions. I walked around, found a five-and-ten, asked a clerk in the housewares department where I’d find an icepick. She shunted me to the hardware department, where another clerk told me they didn’t carry icepicks.

“I guess they’re out of date,” I said.

She didn’t bother to answer. I walked around some more, stopped at a storefront that sold hardware and kitchen things. The fellow behind the counter was wearing a camel-hair cardigan and chewing the stub of a cigar. I asked if he carried icepicks and he turned without a word and came back with one stapled to a piece of cardboard.

“Ninety-eight cents,” he said. “Is one-oh-six with the tax.”

I didn’t really want it. I had just wondered at price and availability. I paid for it anyway. Outside I stopped at a wire trash basket and discarded the brown paper bag and the piece of cardboard and examined my purchase. The blade was four or five inches long, the point sharp. The handle was a cylinder of dark wood. I held it alternately in one hand and then the other, dropped it back in my pocket.

I went back into the store. The man who’d sold it to me looked up from his magazine. “I just bought that icepick from you,” I said.

“Something wrong with it?”

“It’s fine. You sell many of them?”

“Some.”

“How many?”

“Don’t keep track,” he said. “Sell one now and then.”

“What do people buy them for?”

He gave me the guarded look you get when people begin to wonder about your sanity. “Whatever they want,” he said. “I don’t guess they pick their teeth with ’em, but anything else they want.”

“You been here long?”

“How’s that?”

“You had this store a long time?”

“Long enough.”

I nodded, left. I didn’t ask him who’d bought an icepick from him nine years ago. If I had, he wouldn’t have been the only one doubting my sanity. But if someone had asked him that question right after Barbara Ettinger was killed, if someone had asked him and every other housewares and hardware dealer in that part of Brooklyn, and if they’d shown around the appropriate photographs and asked a few other appropriate questions, maybe they would have come up with Barbara’s killer then and there.

No reason to do so. No reason to think it was anything but what it looked like, another score for the Icepick Prowler.

I walked around, my hand gripping the butt end of the icepick in my pocket. Handy little thing. You couldn’t slash with it, you could only stab, but it would still do a pretty good job on someone.

Was it legal to carry it? The law classified it not as a deadly weapon but as a dangerous instrument. Deadly weapons are things like loaded guns, switch knives, gravity knives, daggers, billies, blackjacks and brass knuckles, articles with no function but murderous assault. An icepick had other uses, though the man who sold it hadn’t managed to tell me any of them.

Still, that didn’t mean you could carry it legally. A machete’s a dangerous instrument in the eyes of the law, not a deadly weapon, but you’re not allowed to carry one through the streets of New York.

I took the thing out of my pocket a couple of times and looked at it. Somewhere along the way I dropped it through a sewer grating.

Had the icepick used on Barbara Ettinger vanished the same way? It was possible. It was even possible that it had been dropped down that very sewer grating. All kinds of things were possible.

The wind was getting worse instead of better. I stopped for another drink.

I lost track of the time. At one point I looked at my watch and it was twenty-five minutes of four. I remembered that I was supposed to meet Lynn London at four o’clock. I didn’t see how I could get there on time. Still, she was in Chelsea, it wouldn’t take all that long—

Then I caught myself. What was I worrying about? Why break my neck to keep an appointment when she wouldn’t be keeping it herself? Because her father would have talked to her, either early that morning or late the night before, and she’d know by now that there’d been a change in the London family policy. Matthew Scudder was no longer representing the best interests of the Londons. He was persisting in his folly for reasons of his own, and perhaps he had the right to do this, but he couldn’t count on the cooperation of Charles London or his schoolmarm daughter.

“You say something?”

I looked up, met the warm brown eyes of the bartender. “Just talking to myself,” I said.

“Nothin’ wrong with that.”

I liked his attitude. “Might as well give me another,” I said. “And take something for yourself while you’re at it.”

I called Jan twice from Brooklyn and her line was busy both times. When I got back to Manhattan I called her again from Armstrong’s and got another busy signal. I finished a cup of coffee with a shot in it and tried her again and the line was still busy.

I had the operator check the line. She came back and told me the receiver was off the hook. There’s a way they can make the phone ring even if you’ve taken it off the hook, and I thought about identifying myself as a policeman and getting her to do that, but decided to let it go.

I had no right to interrupt the woman. Maybe she was asleep. Maybe she had company.

Maybe there was a man there, or a woman. It was no business of mine.

Something settled in my stomach and glowed there like a hot coal. I had another cup of bourbon-flavored coffee to drown it.

The evening hurried on by. I didn’t really pay it too much attention. My mind tended to drift.

I had things to think about.

At one point I found myself on the phone, dialing Lynn London’s number. No answer. Well, she’d told me she had tickets for a concert. And I couldn’t remember why I was calling her, anyway. I’d already decided there was no point. That was why I’d missed my appointment with her.

Not that she’d have shown up herself. Would have left me standing there, feeling stupid.

So I called Jan again. Still busy.

I thought about going over there. Wouldn’t take too long by cab. But what was the point? When a woman takes her phone off the hook it’s not because she’s hoping you’ll come knock on her door.

Hell with her.

BACK at the bar, somebody was talking about the First Avenue Slasher. I gathered he was still at large. One of the surviving victims had described how the man had attempted to start a conversation with him before showing his weapon and attacking.

I thought about the little article I’d read about muggers asking you the time or directions. Don’t talk to strangers, I thought.

“That’s the trouble with this place tonight,” I said. “Too many strangers.”

A couple of people looked at me. From behind the bar, Billie asked me if I was all right.

“I’m fine,” I assured him. “Just that it’s too crowded tonight. No room to breathe.”

“Probably a good night to turn in early.”

“You said it.”

But I didn’t feel like turning in, just like getting the hell out of there. I went around the corner to McGovern’s and had a quick one. The place was dead so I didn’t hang around. I hit Polly’s Cage across the street and left when the jukebox started getting on my nerves.

The air outside was bracing. It struck me that I’d been drinking all day and that it added up to a hell of a lot of booze, but I seemed to be handling it fine. It wasn’t affecting me at all. I was wide awake, clear-minded, clear-headed. It’d be hours before I’d be able to sleep.

I circled the block, stopped at a hole in the wall on Eighth Avenue, stopped again at Joey Farrell’s. I felt restless and combative and got out of there when the bartender said something that irritated me. I don’t remember what it was.

Then I was walking. I was on Ninth Avenue across the street from Armstrong’s, walking south, and there was something hanging in the air that was putting me on my guard. Even as I was wondering at the feeling, a young man stepped out of a doorway ten yards ahead of me.

He had a cigarette in one hand. As I approached he moved purposefully into my path and asked me for a match.

That’s how the bastards do it. One stops you and sizes you up. The other moves in behind you, and you get a forearm across the windpipe, a knife at your throat.

I don’t smoke but I generally have a pack of matches in my pocket. I cupped my hands, scratched a match. He tucked the unlit cigarette between his lips and leaned forward, and I flipped the burning match in his face and went in under it, grabbing and shoving hard, sending him reeling into the brick wall behind him.

I whirled myself, ready for his partner.

There was nobody behind me. Nothing but an empty street.

That made it simpler. I kept turning, and I was facing him when he came off the wall with his eyes wide and his mouth open. He was my height but lighter in build, late teens or early twenties, uncombed dark hair and a face white as paper in the light of the streetlamps.

I moved in quick and hit him in the middle. He swung at me and I sidestepped the punch and hit him again an inch or two above his belt buckle. That brought his hands down and I swung my right forearm in an arc and hit him in the mouth with my elbow. He drew back and clapped both hands to his mouth.

I said, “Turn around and grab that wall! Come on, you fucker. Get your hands on the wall!”

He said I was crazy, that he hadn’t done anything. The words came out muffled through the hands he was holding to his mouth.

But he turned around and grabbed the wall.

I moved in, hooked a foot in front of his, drew his foot back so that he couldn’t come off the wall in a hurry.

“I didn’t do nothing,” he said. “What’s the matter with you?”

I told him to put his head against the wall.

“All I did was ask you for a match.”

I told him to shut up. I frisked him and he stood still for it. A little blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. Nothing serious. He was wearing one of those leather jackets with a pile collar and two big pockets in front. Bomber jackets, I think they call them. The pocket on the left held a wad of Kleenex and a pack of Winston Lights. The other pocket held a knife. A flick of my wrist and the blade dropped into place.

A gravity knife. One of the seven deadly weapons.

“I just carry it,” he said.

“For what?”

“Protection.”

“From who? Little old ladies?”

I took a wallet off his hip. He had ID that indicated he was Anthony Sforczak and he lived in Woodside, Queens. I said, “You’re a long ways from home, Tony.”

“So?”

He had two tens and some singles in his wallet. In another pants pocket I found a thick roll of bills secured by a rubber band, and in the breast pocket of his shirt, under the leather jacket, I found one of those disposable butane lighters.

“It’s out of fluid,” he said.

I flicked it. Flame leaped from it and I showed it to him. The heat rose and he jerked his head to the side. I released the thumbcatch and the flame died.

“It was out before. Wouldn’t light.”

“So why keep it? Why not throw it away?”

“It’s against the law to litter.”

“Turn around.”

He came off the wall slowly, eyes wary. A little line of blood trailed from the corner of his mouth down over his chin. His mouth was starting to puff up some where my elbow had caught him.

He wouldn’t die of it.

I gave him the wallet and the cigarette lighter. I tucked the roll of bills in my own pocket.

“That’s my money,” he said.

“You stole it.”

“Like hell I did! What are you gonna do, keep it?”

“What do you think?” I flicked the knife open and held it so that the light glinted off the face of the blade. “You better not turn up in this part of the city again. Another thing you better not do is carry a blade when half the department’s looking for the First Avenue Slasher.”

He stared at me. Something in his eyes said he wished I didn’t have that knife in my hand. I met his gaze and closed the knife, dropped it on the ground behind me.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Be my guest.”

I balanced on the balls of my feet, waiting for him. For a moment he might have been considering it, and I was hoping he’d make a move. I could feel the blood singing in my veins, pulsing in my temples.

He said, “You’re crazy, you know? What you are is crazy,” and he edged off ten or twenty yards, then half-ran to the corner.

I stood watching until he was out of sight.

The street was still empty. I found the gravity knife on the pavement and put it in my pocket. Across the street, Armstrong’s door opened and a young man and woman emerged. They walked down the street holding hands.

I felt fine. I wasn’t drunk. I’d had a day of maintenance drinking, nothing more. Look how I’d handled the punk. Nothing wrong with my instincts, nothing slow about my reflexes. The booze wasn’t getting in the way. Just a matter of taking on fuel, of keeping a full tank. Nothing wrong with that.