The Keys to the Kingdom

Some trust in chariots. In the winter of 1973, the whole city did.
New York is running out of gasoline. Lines stretch a hundred cars deep, stations ration by license plate, and almost overnight an automobile stops being something a man drives and becomes something he owns - and something worth taking.
Rafael Colón is nineteen, raised over a bodega on East 111th Street by a grandmother who reads him Proverbs by lamplight. Nicky Sabatino is twenty, out of Ozone Park, and can open a locked car door in under a minute without a soul on the street believing he did anything but a favor.
Fired from a gas station for a theft neither of them committed, the two friends land work parking cars at Fontana's Chop House on East Fifty-third - twelve dollars a night and whatever gets folded into a handshake at the end of it. Then, on a slow Tuesday in October, a bank vice-president locks his keys inside a brand-new Lincoln Continental, and Nicky opens it in fifty-three seconds on a lit public street.
The owner of the restaurant is watching from under the green awning.
What follows isn't a beating. It's an introduction - four flights down a service stair off Forty-ninth and Park, to an abandoned railroad platform beneath the city, where a small man in a belted trench coat and a dark fedora sits at a card table with a dead cigar in his teeth. They call him the Tailor, because he takes what's in front of him and makes it fit. He does not steal automobiles. He fills orders.
He has a typed list. He has five rules. And he has more money for one night's work than either boy has earned in a year.
For a while it is easy. That is the terrible part - how easy it is, and how fast a line painted on the ground stops looking like a wall. There is a winter coat bought for a woman who knows exactly where the money came from and never asks twice. There is a lie told at a kitchen table that cannot be untold.
And then there is a dark blue Buick that is not on the list, taken off a Bensonhurst street on a February night - and forty seconds onto the Belt Parkway, something in the trunk moves.
The Keys to the Kingdom is a novel of engines, appetite, and the exact price of a good name: a period-faithful descent through the chop shops, supper clubs, and gasoline lines of 1970s New York, and a hard-eyed reckoning with what a man trades away one small yes at a time.
My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not... And they lay wait for their own blood. - Proverbs 1:10, 18