The Azure Bite

Vinny knew the taste of blue. It started subtle, a thin, almost electrical tang on his tongue right after Marco said, 'We're good, man, just go.' And Vinny, dumb bastard that he was, went. Now it was a constant thing, a low thrumming under his teeth, a metallic bite like licking a frozen flagpole in January, but with a cold, impossibly deep hue that soaked into his gums. It wasn't the taste of blood, though he'd known that too, plenty of times. This was something else. This was the color of bad news.

He sat hunched in the back booth of The Rusty Nail, a place that smelled of stale beer and desperation. His phone, a cheap burner, vibrated in his sweaty palm. A ghost of a text, nothing new. Just the silence. Marco hadn’t called back. Three days. Three days since the warehouse job, three days since Vinny cracked the safe and Marco scooped the goods. Three days since the blue started to bloom in his mouth.

The plan was simple enough, or so Marco swore. Old man Costello kept his retirement stash in a bolted-down safe in his dusty storage unit down by the docks. Costello was away, visiting his sister in Florida. Easy money, Marco said. Split fifty-fifty. Vinny did his part, smooth as silk. The tumblers clicked, the door swung open, and there it was: a shoebox full of twenties, a couple of rolls of hundred-dollar bills, and a small, velvet bag that Marco snatched up quick. 'Family heirlooms,' he’d grunted, not looking at Vinny, just stuffing it all into a duffel. That was the first prick of the blue. Marco’s quick hand, his averted eyes.

Vinny waited in the humid night, the sweat running down his back, while Marco supposedly dropped the stuff. Twenty minutes, half an hour, then an hour. Vinny started walking, the blue starting to spread, thin and cold. He called Marco. Straight to voicemail. He called again. Same thing. He walked faster, the dock lights blurring, his stomach clenching. He walked until his legs burned and his lungs ached. He walked until the sun was just a smear of orange on the horizon, and the blue in his mouth was a bitter, full-blown ache.

Now, every cheap coffee he drank, every stale cigarette he lit, it just layered over the blue, never quite erasing it. It was the color of the empty streets at 3 AM, the color of the distant, uninterested sky. It was the color of being alone. He saw Marco’s face in the reflections of storefront windows, a cruel grin, a fleeting shadow. He saw the velvet bag in his mind, small, dark, heavy with whatever Marco deemed more important than an even split. He just needed to know. Not even the money, not really. Just why. Just the damn why.

A news report flickered on the bar's greasy TV screen: 'Local jewelry heist, family jewels recovered. Suspect still at large.' A blurry photo of a police sketch, generic, could be anyone. But then they showed a close-up of the recovered goods: a diamond-studded locket, a ruby ring, and a small, gold coin with a distinct crest. Vinny recognized the crest. He’d seen it etched into the velvet bag Marco had snatched from Costello’s safe.

The blue surged, thick and overwhelming, a tidal wave of it, tasting like shattered glass and frozen pennies and the deep, dark ocean where things went to disappear. His hands trembled, sloshing coffee onto the chipped Formica table. He felt a cold sweat break out on his forehead, his shirt sticking to him. He didn't just taste the blue now; he felt it in his veins, chilling him from the inside out. He thought of Marco, laughing, somewhere warm, somewhere safe, while Vinny sat here, tasting the cold, hard consequence of his trust.

He slammed the phone onto the table. It wasn't just the fifty-fifty he was owed; it was the fifty-fifty he was now carrying. The law didn’t care who carried what. They just cared that a safe was cracked, and jewelry was taken. And Vinny, the idiot with the sticky fingers and the trusting heart, was the one left holding the bag, the invisible one, the one that tasted like betrayal. He pushed himself up from the booth, the chair scraping loudly across the floor, the sound harsh in the quiet bar. He needed to find Marco. Needed to see the expression on his face, one last time, before the blue completely swallowed him whole. He just needed to make him taste it too.