"That's going to be a limited pool," Lauren grumbled. She didn't really know anyone in town - most of her former employees had left. There was Lark, but Lauren only had the shop number, and the artist who'd gone over to the other shop with her. She didn't have roadside assistance of any sort. All the same, she opened the car door and, hunched awkwardly to try to both minimize dripping on her seats while still using the roof to keep her phone dry, made a couple calls. All busts until her last try - her former employee, now co-worker. He was late for work, but agreed he could spare two minutes to swing by and drop off a tire iron. And as luck would have it, he was right around the corner. Lauren had barely hung up and tossed the phone back on her passenger seat before he was doing a slow drive-by, fishing a tire iron out from under the seat of his truck and tossing it on the ground near her feet. With a wave, he was gone again.
"Well, better than nothing, I guess," Lauren said, unable to do anything but laugh at the entire thing. She hadn't expected him to stop and help; just the tool was more help than she'd expected at all that night. No sense in him getting soaked when it already looked like she'd fallen into a swimming pool. "But I should probably invest in triple-A if I'm going to regularly forget my own tools at home, shouldn't I?" In slightly better spirits now that she had the means to change the tire herself, Lauren grinned over at the stranger who'd stopped as she bent to loosen the lugnuts. Rookie mistake: jacking the car up before loosening the bolts. Then she frowned slightly, when her considerable yank did jack-all. She was fairly strong, but whoever'd last tightened these had really done a number on them.