The person crouched by the wheel stood up.
It was a woman, tall, in a long navy wool coat that came down past her knees, and in the last of the light her hair was the most remarkable thing on that whole stretch of highway. It was red. Not orange, not strawberry, not the brassy color women got out of a box at the Ben Franklin, but a dark true red like the inside of a split cedar log, and it was pinned up in back and coming down in pieces around her face in the wind. She had a lug wrench in one hand and a scissor jack in the other, and she was holding the jack upside down.
"Evening," Dale said. "Looks like you picked up something."
"I picked up something about four miles back," she said, "and I've been driving on it ever since, telling myself it was the road." She had a flat Minnesota voice with something brisk underneath it. "I don't suppose you're an angel of the Lord."
"I'm Haapala's Service, in Munising. Close enough, most days." He nodded at the jack. "Can I?"
She handed it over with what looked like real relief. "Please. I've been trying to remember what my father did, and all I can remember is him swearing."
"That's most of it." He turned the jack right side up and got down on one knee in the gravel. The tire wasn't just low, it was flat to the rim, and when he ran his hand along the tread he found it, the head of a big lag bolt sunk right into the shoulder of the tire. Somebody's load had come loose off a pickup. "Here's your culprit."
"Is it ruined?"
"It's ruined. You drove on it flat, you cooked the sidewall. Spare's in the back?"
"Under the floor, I think. Under the boxes."
The back of the wagon was full of boxes. Cardboard boxes, the kind liquor stores gave away, and they were heavy. Dale lifted them out one at a time and set them on the tailgate, and he noticed without really noticing that they were full of books, a couple of dozen copies of the same thick red book, and a stack of something in manila folders, and a box of what looked like Christmas candles with the little paper drip-guards already on them, though it was only the middle of October. Somebody's church stuff. He figured she was a church secretary, or one of those women who did the altar flowers, or a schoolteacher who'd gotten roped into the Christmas program early.
The spare was a little doughnut with about fourteen pounds of air in it. He'd make do.
He was cracking the lug nuts loose, his weight on the wrench, when he heard the wrecker door open and slam behind him.