Raymond

Raymond runs drug production for San4San, and his product goes to Boobie Ike's club. When the Extended Look opens, he's the meeting Jason and Lucia are on their way to.

Ernesto's phone call

It goes wrong straight away. A man named Ernesto calls to warn him that friends of his in the police are on their way, which is a warning and a confession in the same breath. You can't know the police are coming, and call them your friends, and have nothing to do with it.

Rockstar opened its longest stretch of gameplay footage on that call, and it could've opened on a car chase. It tells you what sort of story this is. Before anybody's driven anywhere, the scene has set up who supplies whom, the betrayal and what's at stake.

Ernesto

Ernesto's the caller. He rings Raymond during the opening sequence to say the police are coming, and he frames it as a favour from somebody with friends in the department. We haven't seen how deliberate the betrayal is or who he's really working for, and Rockstar hasn't released anything about him beyond that scene. He's covered here until there's enough for a page of his own.

The gold rifle

The screenshot set shows Raymond mid-call holding a gold-plated rifle, with the kind of character detail Rockstar's been showing off all along: grills, diamond earrings, heavy chains.

That gold rifle tells you something specific. He's got money and he wants people to see it, which is a different kind of criminal from Brian Heder quietly running boats out of a yard in the Keys. The game looks like it's drawing a line between old Florida crime that keeps its head down and new Florida crime that posts about it.

Stuck between the lab and the club

He makes product for San4San and supplies Boobie Ike's club, so he sits between the making end and the selling end of the story's drug business. That's an exposed spot to be in, and the Extended Look opens by showing you exactly how exposed.

What isn't known

Nobody's explained what San4San is beyond a name. We also don't know how Raymond's connected to Jason and Lucia, or whether he makes it out of the scene he's introduced in.