Odds Against Tomorrow
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For what seemed a long time he couldn’t make himself cross the street and enter the hotel. He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and frowned at the revolving doors and canopied entrance, indifferent to the nighttime crowd drifting past him, his tall body as immobile as a rock in a stream. People edged around him carefully, for there was a look of tension in the set of his shoulders, and in the appraising frown that shadowed his hard even features.
It was the finality of the thing that worried him, he realized, not the consequences...
He knew the hotel, a middle-class commercial establishment close to the heart of the city, an old stone building that had been brightened up with a neon sign and shiny aluminum facings around a black and silver canopy. Lorraine had met him in the lobby once, he remembered; it wasn’t far from her job. They’d had some beers before going home.
Finally he lighted a cigarette and flipped the match toward the sidewalk, hardly noticing the people strolling in front of him. In the end he didn’t make up his mind at all; he simply started toward the hotel, urged forward by a pressure that seemed as inevitable as it was pointless. He sighed and thought: Why not? Why the hell not?